A couple weeks ago, I posted some photos I took along a couple creeks at the Niobrara Valley Preserve. Shockingly, those weren’t the only photos I took during that visit to that 56,000 acre property full of expansive vistas, bison, and prairie.

I also took a photo of some bison.

The following morning, more fitting with my photography personality, I was lying in wet grass photographing milkweed seeds and looking for dew-covered insects.

As the sun rose, the breeze started kicking up a little and the fog nestled down in the river valley started to dissipate. I decided to hike over to a little overlook above the river to see about photographing that foggy valley scene. Instead, I found a bunch of bejeweled spider webs and never made it to the overlook at all.

Because the breeze was rocking the webs back and forth, photographing these spider webs came with an extra degree of difficulty. I had my camera on its tripod and tried to rock the tripod in synchrony with the webs. Mostly, that stratagem failed miserably, but there were a few times when it didn’t. Obviously.

Did you ever notice that the word ‘stratagem’ has an ‘a’ before the ‘g’ but the word ‘strategy’ has an ‘e’ there? I’m sure you have. Doesn’t that seem needlessly confusing? It seems like those two very similar words could get together on this one and make life easier for those of us trying to spell them correctly. Also, the word ‘strategy’ would probably have been a better choice than ‘stratagem’ to describe what I was doing with my tripod, but I feel like I use ‘strategy’ a lot in my writing and wanted to try something different. Actually, ‘tactic’ might have been even more appropriate. Oh well, too late now.

The next three photos are of the same spider from three different angles. He seemed perfectly fine with me hovering around his web. It was probably all the gentle swaying I was doing that placated him.

I don’t know what the fly in the picture below was thinking, getting caught in a web covered in bright sparkly balls of water. Given its brain size, maybe it wasn’t thinking much at all, but still – it had a whole prairie (and plenty of sky above) to fly through and it collided with a deadly, but clearly marked spider web. On the other hand, I guess that kind of behavior is what spiders rely on, isn’t it?

There’s probably a life lesson for all of us there. I sure wish I knew what it was.

Maybe it’s this: “No matter how much you think your elaborate strategy to catch flies has been thwarted by a dew point that matches the air temperature, don’t give up. Maybe you’ll get lucky and there will be a fly that’s too wound up in its own thoughts to notice a cluster of bright sparkling balls of water floating in the middle of the air.”

Or maybe: “Even in the midst of vast expanses of incredible beauty, keep your head on a swivel. There are predators out there, just waiting for you to lose focus and blunder into their poorly-disguised traps.”

Don’t you love that nature always has something to teach us?