My New Neighbor Has Eight Legs and a Knack for Design

August is spider season. The orb-weaver spiders in my yard spend winter tucked away in the egg sacs their mothers made for them in autumn. Come springtime, the spiderlings climb out of their egg sacs and promptly disappear. Lots of creatures will eat a baby spider, so early summer is for hiding. By late summer, those who managed to survive are all grown up and ready to commence their important spider work.

To an orb-weaver, August is for web-spinning and bug-devouring (also, sometimes, mate-devouring). To me, August is for spider-spying. I can think of few things more beautiful than a spiderweb drenched in dew, water droplets lined up like diamonds on invisible silken threads.

Normally, spider-spying would mean going outside at dawn. Orb-weavers spin their webs in darkness and devour them again as night turns to day. But this year an orb-weaver has set up camp outside our bedroom window and turned the entire expanse of glass into a spider-studying station — like those demonstration beehives that fit into classroom windows, half in and half out, or the bird feeders that attach to glass with suction cups.

In August, we have cobweb spiders building in the corners of every window in the house, but we have never had an orb-weaver take up residence in a window before.

The web-construction part of this spider’s operation is typical for orb-weavers: anchor lines, a center hub and spokes, and finally the sticky circular threads that set the spider’s table. What’s not at all typical — at least it’s not typical of any orb-weaver I’ve ever seen before — is the structure this spider has built for herself into the lines that are part of the permanent structure of her web.

It’s a little spider house, the size of a quarter, that hangs right in the middle of the window.

She has built her hideaway of silk and oak catkins, the dried strings of flowers left over from our white oak’s spring bloom. The catkins form the sides and yard-facing wall of the house. Our bedroom window is its back wall. All day long she rests in there, within full view of us but safely hidden from predators in the yard. Even the Carolina wrens that patrol our windows, inspecting cobwebs for the possibility of tasty spiders, have not spied this clever orb-weaver in her catkin bower.

Sometimes in the morning I’ll see that her trap has worked, and some unlucky insect is stuck in the crossbeams of the wagon-wheel web, wrapped up like a delivery package. She once dragged a cocooned moth over to her house and attached it to the side wall with silk and more catkins. A snack for later? I don’t know. The next morning, the moth was gone. There was no vestige of it left on the windowsill below.

I fully admit that what I have not yet noticed about the doings of my wild neighbors over the years still far exceeds what I have learned about them. I don’t even know for sure what kind of orb-weaver spider this is, having never seen her during daylight hours fully emerged from her hiding place. Nevertheless, I find this spider and her hidey-hole remarkable. Could it be that orb-weaver spiders, whatever species of orb-weaver this small neighbor might be, have been building their own hideaways all along and I just never noticed?

I sent a photo to the Nashville naturalist Joanna Brichetto, author of the forthcoming book “This Is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature,” and asked if she’d seen anything like this before. She had not: “I’ve never seen an orb-weaver house! Or heard of one!” she wrote back.

As it turns out, it’s not uncommon for spotted orb-weavers — Ms. Brichetto’s best guess as to my eight-legged neighbor’s identity — to spend the daylight hours hiding in “silken retreats” attached to eaves, or crouched in a rolled-up leaf. Sometimes the leaf stays rolled up courtesy of spider silk, but in reading around I haven’t found any evidence of a spotted orb-weaver gathering up construction materials and building an actual house for herself. At least it’s not behavior that’s common enough to be found in an online search or in either of my field guides to spiders.

What we don’t know about the natural world always far exceeds what we do. But one of the loveliest character traits of our species is curiosity. And the more we learn, the more we inevitably come to realize that many of the qualities that we think of as uniquely human aren’t unique to us at all.

Crows play in the snow. Honeybees exhibit empathy, even to bees that belong to a different colony. Elephants call one another by name. (So do dolphins and bats and who knows how many others.) More than 1,500 different species of animals engage in same-sex sexuality. Cows enjoy music. A dog that I know of watches musicals on television.

In this context, it shouldn’t be particularly surprising that there’s an orb-weaver spider in Tennessee who prefers to rest in a dried-flower house of her own making.

The variation among individuals within a species is what we notice when we’re paying attention. That variation, perhaps more even than the other characteristics we share with nonhuman animals, is where the real revelation of our kinship with them lies. Not in the general traits that their species shares with ours, in other words, but in their differences from one another within the same species.

In my yard alone, I think of the one squirrel who can defeat the squirrel-proof bird feeder, and the one sunbathing skink who has figured out that a person peering through a window will cause her no harm, and the one hummingbird last year who wasn’t afraid of me at all. I think of the blue jay who learned to imitate the call of a baby hawk and deployed it just because it was a fun sound to make. Maybe it’s not the smartest thing in the world for a blue jay to be summoning a mama hawk, but this blue jay seemed to find it highly entertaining.

We are different from one another. They are different from one another.

I was cautioned in school against the “mistake” of anthropomorphism. It’s a mistake to assign human feelings to nonhuman animals, my professors assured me. It’s a mistake to attribute problem-solving, tool-fashioning, language-using individuality to a mere bundle of instinct and hormones. This particular mistake even has a name: the pathetic fallacy.

The science that’s uncovering the individual complexity of other creatures is happening alongside the science that’s uncovering the monstrous mess our species has made of the planet, and it’s impossible not to wonder whether the real fallacy isn’t the pathetic fallacy itself. Wouldn’t it completely change our relationship to the living earth if our default position in every encounter with other living things was a willingness to see something of ourselves in them? Spiders and all?

Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.”

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