All the elderberries were gone. I thought they had at least a few more weeks before they were ripe. Maybe time had passed quicker than I had imagined. It tends to do that. Or maybe they just don’t have as long a berry season as blackberries. Bang! Suddenly the tree is full of ripe berries. Plop! They all drop off the tree and then the leaves wither and fall. Last year when we were at Silverwood , Phillip Lambert the resident manager told us that in So. Cal. our summer is the plants’ winter, the season when leaves wither and fall and the plants go dormant. For someone who grew up with 4 seasons of the more “traditional” type, it is a little unsettling.

I was hoping we would see the coyote pup we saw the last couple times we walked in the Mission Trails grasslands, but there was no sign of it. I wondered if it died. It had looked skinny. Maybe it just got older and wiser and stopped appearing during the day. There were a lot of rabbits around.

We didn’t walk far—just to the dried out gorge area where we’d seen the coyote and back to the grasslands. On our way back Rowshan noticed a big black tarantula. It steadily crawled over the blades of dry oat straw, bending them underneath its body. “It’s like a tank,” Rowshan said. It was black and had a hairy patch on its butt and hairy parts on its upper legs.

When we got to the street, we saw a slender blonde woman watching another big black tarantula crawling in the dirt just off the pavement.

“Have you seen any tarantula hawks?” she asked as we approached. I’d never heard of a tarantula hawk. I looked around for birds of prey.

“You see a lot of them around,” she said. At that moment a biker in red rode up. “That’s the 3rd one I’ve seen just over this last bit of road,” he said referring to the tarantula.

I turned back to the woman. “What do they look like,” I asked wanting to know more about the tarantula hawks.

“They look like big wasps. Sometimes you see them carrying tarantulas away.”  Oh, so they weren’t even birds.

“Oh, tarantula hawks,” the man said, joining the conversation.

“How big are they?” I asked in incredulously imagining wasps carrying tarantulas.

“About like this,” she said holding her hands 7 or 8 inches apart.

“They lay their eggs in them,”  the man said pointing at the spider.

“I’ve seen it. It’s disgusting,” said the woman.

“What kind did you see?” the guy asked.

“I didn’t know there were different kinds,” the woman replied.

“Oh yah, all kinds. Some have green wings, some have blue.”

“I’ve just seen the black and orange ones.”

“Those are California tarantula hawks.” the guy said. “You know you can pick the tarantulas up. Put your hand next to it and it will climb right onto you.”

“I’ll pass,” Rowshan said.

“Aren’t their hairs itchy?” I asked, remembering an image from the Planet’s Most Extreme… showing a box of itching powder purportedly made from tarantula hairs.

“Not really,” he replied. Itchy or not, I wasn’t willing to pick up the tarantula either. (Note: Though a tarantula may not harm you if you pick it up, you might harm the tarantula. According to a post on The Pest Control blog, “if a tarantula falls from 6 inches it could be severely injured and a fall from a foot  will most likely be fatal.”) When it was evident that none of us would pick up the spider, the biker rode off.

“Isn’t it great we can see all this so close,” the woman said happily as she walked away.