Backyard Almanac: "The hotter the summer, the bigger the spiders" and other horror stories

Summary: Vernal ponds are drying up. June will go down as one of the top five driest Junes in 150 years. And now ... big spiders.* Perhaps this quote from Dorothy Molter, the "Root Beer Lady" sums up these days best: "When it gets to be July, I look forward to the long cold nights of November." *A note about this photograph The photographer who contributed this shot to Flickr also wrote about it back in 2009 in a blog post, and knows quite a big about these little eight-leggeds. You can read the post and