The King Commons: October 2011

Who knew that northeastern Oklahoma was for tarantula migrations in the fall? Actually, we did - we had heard about it from our neighbor and have been watching every year to see some. Well, we finally did tonight. Leslie's mom and dad and sister came to visit us so we went to our favorite nearby state park to have dinner in the wild. As we were driving in to the park we saw something large and hairy crawling down the road. We were in two cars so I called Leslie and told her. Then we decided to turn around and get out to see it.

We ended up finding two fairly large tarantulas! Leslie's dad, Merrill, was brave enough to catch one in a large plastic cup, and Morgan caught the other one in an ice cream bucket. We watched them while we ate dinner and got brave enough to touch their back legs while they were in the bucket.

Peter loved watching them! We had to make sure that he didn't reach in and smash them. Actually he did push on them a few times with his chicken nugget. Hopefully tarantulas are sanitary!? (You might want to scroll down and pause the music on our webpage before watching the videos.)

We showed them to a few other people and then decided to walk down a trail before letting them go. When we got to a good place we decided we were brave enough to dump them out onto someone's lap. Morgan and I sat down and Merrill got ready to let the tarantulas out. Peter decided to climb onto my lap, too. One tarantula ended up on him and started crawling up his shirt toward his face. Everyone screamed and we tried to pick Peter up and brush off the tarantula, but it crawled under Peter's armpit and onto his back. It was an Indiana Jones moment as we tried to get it brushed off him as quickly as we could. I only wish we got Leslie's face on the video (but you can hear her voice)! If you watch closely you can see the spider on Peter's back for a second. This video might be worth watching full screen (click on the YouTube logo at the bottom right of the video and then a new webpage will open up; then click on the icon of the four outward pointing arrows at the very bottom right of the video).

Finally we decided the tarantula wasn't too bad and we let him crawl on our hands and arms. Merrill was the first one brave enough to try it (besides Peter, of course). Then Morgan tried it and so did I (the tarantula crawled up my arm and onto my back, touching my neck for a minute - ahhh! - before it crawled down my other arm). We even got Leslie to try it for a minute!