By Brandon Case
Pratt columnist
Special to the Tribune

Spiders were everywhere after dusk that evening. Their webs spanned across the trail in places where, an hour or two earlier, were none.

It was a spider immersion hike—definitely not for the faint-hearted.

That was August 2014 and, after a day of learning at the National Conservation Training Center (NCTC) near Shepherdstown, West Virgina, I decided to hike solo into the woods that surrounded the NCTC campus. I was there to attend the Friends Academy to learn about the operations of the US Fish and Wildlife Service and also how to be better Friend of a wildlife refuge (for me, Quivira NWR, where I was then a Friends board member).

I don’t know what the different species of spiders were, but, as mentioned earlier, the arachnids were in full force after the daylight disappeared. As I walked along, I sometimes had to stop suddenly or else nose-dive into a web. Typically, when my face was that close, a spider would drop off the web and scurry away.

Because of the many spider threads crisscrossing the trail, my face and arms were covered in spider silk by the time I emerged into a clearing. It was a sort of baptism into the world of spiderdom. If I had hiked much longer that evening, my face and arms well might have been cocooned.

For someone with a mother such as mine who is an avowed spider killer (and who has had arachnophobia probably all her life), it was a transformative experience in my relationship with spiders.

There was a bonus that evening. As I hiked toward the buildings on the NCTC campus, I heard what sounded like a sitar being plucked. Interesting, I thought, somebody brought a sitar with them. I let my ears guide me to the sound, which brought me to a pond.

There was no sitar. Rather, this intriguing sound was created by a green frog (lithobates clamitans). The froglady.org describes the lithobates clamitans this way: “These frogs can produce as many as 6 different

calls – however the most distinctive sound is a throaty boink that sounds like a loose banjo string being plucked.”

Do a search for green frog sounds to hear it for yourself. The natural world is truly full of wonders.