Charlotte's Babies

At the end of E.B. White's Charlotte's Web, Wilbur has returned from the fair to the farm and Charlotte has gone to the great spiderweb in the sky. Templeton the rat has retrieved Charlotte's egg sac, which is stored in a pile of hay to await what comes next. Springtime arrives, and one day the hay is alive with hundreds of tiny spiders who cast a web strand to the wind and float away.

We encountered a real-life swarm of spiderlings on Sunday afternoon as they came into the world and went upwards to cast web strands to the wind. Photos first, then descriptions:

(For reference, each of these spiders are about the size of a sesame seed.)

Just like Charlotte's Web, there were probably hundreds of spiderlings that had just hatched or were getting ready to join the world. Instead of climbing a fence to catch the breeze, they had constructed a web walkway from our chiminea, to a chair, to the top of the market umbrella. And in an orderly fashion, they were heading for higher ground to see if they could head out on the afternoon winds. No idea what these were, though given our frequent encounters with wolf spiders, this would likely make the most sense.