Spiders tend to have a bad reputation in European culture, where people's interactions with spiders range from little Miss Muffet being frightened from her tuffet to Frodo barely escaping the ferocious Shelob with his life. It is rare for the spider to come out on top. Often painted as the ''bad guy'', the spider must be defeated in the course of a good story.
For thousands of years people have been using stories to learn. That's where we first learnt to be wary of those many-legged creepy-crawly creatures that lurk in dark corners. It is ingrained deep in our psyche to be afraid of dangerous things, and in some parts of the world spiders are worth avoiding because of their venom.
The actual threat of spiders to humans is far less than we imagine. Here in New Zealand there have not been any confirmed deaths from spider bites, and even our cousins across the Ditch have had no recorded deaths resulting from spider venom since 1979.
If you are visiting or living in a place with genuinely venomous spiders, then by all means take care, but the slight risk does not justify waging war on an entire order of animals.
Here in New Zealand we are pretty safe. Our native spiders are rather chilled-out characters (unless of course you're a ''dinner-sized'' bush cockroach) and they provide us with an ideal opportunity to rethink our attitude to spiders.
New Zealand's native spiders are totally worth getting to know and I'd like to start a revolution. As New Zealanders we pride ourselves on being different, so let's set ourselves apart and start appreciating spiders - sign up for the fan club today!
One of the things I do at Orokonui Ecosanctuary is act as ambassador for all the amazing creepy-crawlies out there.
With this being a good time to encounter spiders, why not become familiar with them? All those beautifully spun bundles of silk adorning hedges and grassheads at this time of year are the beginnings of one of our more beautiful species - the nursery-web spider.
We are reaching the end of the breeding season in the forest and those bundles tucked among coprosma and gorse are starting to disintegrate. These are the nurseries of a very good mother, Dolomedes minor, the nursery-web spider. They do not build a web to trap their food. Instead they hunt at night, the ''tigers'' of a forest microworld. The web is dedicated entirely to their young and encloses a bundle of the finest silk and spiders' eggs.
Take another look at that web and you might see her standing guard on the underside or in the shrub below, while inside the web the spiderlings hatch and live in relative safety from a forest full of creatures that might gobble them up. The hatchlings feed initially on the spider silk and when they are big enough and their nursery starts to fall apart, they send up a thread of silk to catch the wind and drift away.
Orokonui is home to a vast array of absolutely stunning spiders. Visit on a misty day when the cloud moisture is trapped by fine spider silks and see the distinctive webs of our introduced, but still beautiful Sombrero spiders adorning the forest, or spot their orbwebs - the most distinctively ''spidery'' sort of web.
However, you are not likely to see the spinners during the day. Being such excellent bird food, they tend to appear when most of the insectivores are asleep.
Brave enough to venture out in the daytime are the striking green-and-white flower spiders, camouflaged perfectly for their backdrop of flowers or leaves to avoid birds. Sharp-sighted visitors to the ecosanctuary may be rewarded with one of these on a daytime spider hunt, so bring your children or grandchildren along. Otherwise, come out for a night walk with me and I will show you.
Get to know spiders
Take a twilight and after-dark tour and have a look at the amazing Orokonui nightlife. Find a trustworthy source, and learn something new about spiders.
If you do happen to be bitten, visit www.healthed.govt.nz/resource/spiders-new-zealand
- Sofie Welvaert is a guide and volunteer at Orokonui Ecosanctuary.
- Wild Ways appears in the Magazine section on the first Saturday of each month.
