Itsy Bitsy Spider...

All summer I have been trying to get a look at what I thought was a black widow spider, living in the valve box that holds the irrigation controllers that water our yard. I didn't know black widows lived in Maryland until my wife mentioned earlier in the year that she had seen one in the valve box. I have several times cleared the sticky webs that reminded me of the ones we always had in our garage in California - just no sight of one. But today, when I went to turn on the valve to give the resident female eastern box turtle a little wetting down, there was the spider hiding in the valve box cover. A quick visual identification guide of the spiders found in Maryland can be found by accessing the link by clicking here. A nice general guide to identify various insect orders can be found by clicking here.