For Spiders, Try a ‘Green’ Approach Before Using Poison

Question: How do I recognize brown recluse spiders and black widow spiders?

I live in an urban canyon and I want to clean out my dark, damp garage in preparation for a garage sale. This will mean pulling out boxes that haven’t been touched for years. Neighbors tell me to bomb or fumigate before even moving anything. How can I avoid getting bitten?

J.D.

Beverly Glen

Answer: Brown recluse spiders, also called violin or fiddle-back spiders, are named for their shy, retiring habits and the dark outline of a violin you see on their upper back. They have a predilection for dark, dry areas, so you’ll commonly find them in boxes, between paper and near stored things that are rarely moved.

In the house, they prefer to live under beds and couches, particularly those with skirts, and in hard-to-reach areas like the backs of closets. Brown recluses use their untidy webs to live in.

Female black widows, which are the ones you want to avoid, are easy to identify. Excluding legs, their bodies can be large, up to one-half inch long, very round and a surprisingly shiny black hue.

While they do have that telltale red hourglass you may have heard about, it’s on their belly, which they aren’t likely to show you. So unless you’ve got the spider contained in a jar, that marking isn’t particularly useful in identification.

The black widow male, which is not a threat because it doesn’t produce any venom as an adult, is much smaller, with brownish legs and a bullet-shaped body with small orange-reddish spots and white stripes.

Places you may find black widows in are the garage near the door and cluttered areas where they can ensnare their prey in a web.

Black widows are commonly found in children’s outdoor play equipment, gardening boots left outside, on porch furniture and in cracks in a house’s eaves.

According to Michael Bohdain, author of “What’s Bugging You?,” (Santa Monica Press, 1998) brown recluses fall in the category of “naked spiders.”

“Since 90% of the spiders you’ll find in your home have hairy legs, a brown recluse is fairly easy to identify,” Bohdain said.

In attacking the clutter in your garage, Bohdain recommends a “green” approach before resorting to poison.

“Glue boards will give you a good idea what you’re dealing with before you consider using poison yourself or even hiring a pest control company,” Bohdain said, adding, “I’ve caught up to 22 brown recluses over a two-week period under one bed using a glue board.”

Place the glue boards on shelves, in and around boxes and in the general vicinity where you’ll be cleaning.

For those who worry about the humaneness of glue boards, Bohdain recommends a quick “tennis shoe sandwich” once the spider is stuck.

Once you’ve had the glue trap out for a few weeks, spray a liquid residual throughout the garage in suspicious areas. These chemical sprays, which can be found at most home centers or garden centers, leave a film for a period of time.

When I asked him about foggers, Bohdain said he doesn’t recommend them for homeowners.

“I’ve seen too many homeowners blow their windows out by forgetting to turn off the pilot light when they use foggers,” he said. Besides, spiders frequently evade foggers by hiding where the chemical can’t reach.

To keep your body protected once you begin cleaning, wear knee-high thick rubber boots with your pant legs tucked in, thick leather gloves and jeans.

If you think you’ve been bitten, don’t panic. Brown recluse bites aren’t fatal, but the spider’s venom can be very damaging locally since it kills the tissue where it’s injected.

If you’ve been bitten, you probably won’t feel the bite, but the site will sting and become painful shortly thereafter. A blister will appear and the area will swell. Symptoms include restlessness, fever and trouble sleeping.

Black widow bites are treatable with an antitoxin, although they can be fatal in small children. If you think you may have been bitten by a black widow or brown recluse, immediately go to the doctor or emergency room and take the spider with you if possible so its identity can be confirmed.

You also may not feel a black widow’s bite. But you’ll probably feel pretty severe pain shortly afterward. The bite site won’t look like much, just two tiny red spots with a little local swelling.

If you can’t get the spider population under control or are still concerned, call a pest-control company to evaluate and treat your garage.

Baby Bunnies Leave Their Nest When Ready

Q: I had a cottontail rabbit make a nest in the middle of my yard. I put some wire fencing around it, and the mother wasn’t upset about it. I loved watching her come to nurse the babies, but after three weeks the babies were gone. What do you think happened to the baby bunnies?

V.F.

San Fernando

A: You know what they say about rabbits’ love lives: busy, busy, busy. Our native rabbits, the desert cottontail (Sylvilagus auduboni) and brush rabbit (S. bachmani), can have up to six litters a year in the Southland, thanks to our ideal climate. They generally cram all these litters into the period between December and June, although there are exceptions.

Cottontails make their nests in a protected area, pushing down the earth and grass to form a small depression. Once the mother has given birth to an average of three infants, all of which are furless and have closed eyes, she’ll return to the nest at dusk and again at dawn to nurse them.

Like deer, rabbits protect their babies by leaving them alone in the nest during the day, drawing any scent and thus predators away from the little ones.

When these babies reach self-sufficiency at two or three weeks of age, they leave the nest and are on their own.

Koi Pond Vandals May Well Be Raccoons

Q: I have a fishpond with koi, goldfish, snails and pond plants. I am sure I have had an animal intruder on more than one occasion because I have one missing koi and have found snails out of the pond and crunched plants. My pond decorations have been thrown out of the water and onto the deck too. What is going on, and how do I save my pond?

A: This kind of damage to backyard ponds is most commonly caused by raccoons, highly social animals that thrive around people and their trappings.

Since in nature raccoons prefer to live near water, where they dine on crayfish, worms and grasshoppers, it’s only natural that they should be attracted to the beautiful, natural-looking ponds we build in our backyards.

Not surprisingly, raccoons aren’t dainty about dinner. Instead, they’ll pick everything up and out of the water, check to see if it’s edible and then heave it, which accounts for the mess around your pond.

To save your pond, zip down to your local home-improvement center and pick up an electric fence. This is simply a charger, enough wire to string around the area twice, a 6-foot grounding rod, fiberglass fence posts and clips or pins to attach the wire to the posts.

Buy a high voltage output, low amperage charger that says “low impedance” on it. This means it’ll pulsate rather than have a continuous charge, and your fence will have a lot of kick but not a lot of power behind it.

When the raccoons move up to the fence, which they won’t recognize as a threat to begin with, they’ll get a quick shock that should scare the living daylights out of them without harming them. Therein lies the training.

After a few days, the raccoons should get the point. Unless the fence is really distracting to your sense of aesthetics, I wouldn’t take it down. If you see one raccoon, chances are there are more around.

But do turn the charger off if there are kids playing near the pond in the daytime. Unless you have a truly unwell raccoon, your masked fish thieves should only appear well after dusk, so you’ll only need to have it on at night.

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Got critter conflicts? Send your queries to wildlife biologist Andrea Kitay at P.O. Box 2489, Camarillo, CA 93011, or via e-mail to andrea@livingwithwildlife.com. Please include your name and city. Questions cannot be answered individually. For a list of Wildlife Bulletins that provide sound advice on homeowner-wildlife conflicts ($4 each), send an SASE to the above address, or visit https://www.livingwithwildlife.com.