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Monday, January 10, 2011 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM

Condemned, San Antonio NM, January 30, 2010
Condemned, San Antonio NM, January 30, 2010

Tomorrow I'm outa here

It's time to get a move on. I'm beginning to develop a case of what Brian Gore calls "hitch itch" on his goin' RV Boondocking blog, and I need to get moving before I into out a rash. I want to start my trek up the Rio Grande valley to San Antonio NM. I'm getting anxious to get up there to spend a month or so photographing the Sandhill Cranes wintering at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge before they head off for their summer nesting grounds in mid February.

I delayed my departure a day from LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM to put in long days yesterday and today to get some basic restructuring of this website in place. That's pretty much done and the old version of the site has been condemned.

Night camp

Site 8 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM

Five Trillion Spiders

Spiders begin their hunting with a few handicaps. They're often smaller and weaker than their prey, and they have no wings to give chase in the air. Some species extend their legs by hydraulic pressure, using the same liquid that carries oxygen from their lungs, so they have a hard time running and breathing at the same time. Even their poison may be no match for their victim's: a crab spider's bite is to a honeybee's sting as "an air-gun compared with an elephant rifle," John Crompton wrote. Yet spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.

From Spider Woman by Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker magazine, March 5, 2007, page 69

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