Searching for Spiders on Bald Head Island

By Morgan Greene, Marketing Associate

Bald Head spiders up close!

If you visited the Fleming Environmental Education Center the week before Halloween, you were in for a spooky surprise—we were all decked out for Spider Week in honor of the NC Spider Search!

The NC Spider Search is an event through Science Across NC, a collaboration of science organizations bringing North Carolinians together through fun science activities. To take part in the Spider Search, participants uploaded pictures of any spiders they found throughout the week to iNaturalist, a user-friendly citizen science app that identifies plants and animals in the world around you. Anyone who photographed seven different spiders during the week was able to earn an embroidered 2023 NC Spider Search badge!

Spider Searchers and BHIC staff identifying spiders in the wild with the iNaturalist app.

At the end of Spider Week, we held our own guided spider hunt at the BHI Conservancy. BHIC staff led the Spooky Spider Walk around our campus to teach visitors about Bald Head Island’s resident spiders and help Spider Searchers earn their badges. We also had plenty of fun spider activities by ecoEXPLORE in Fleming, including spider coloring pages, draw-your-own spider-comics and spider-superhero pages, and live spiders found on the island for visitors to see up close!

Join us for Spider Week 2024 to make your own spider crafts!

If you weren’t able to swing by this year, don’t worry—you can join us next October for Spider Week 2024. Be sure to stop by the BHI Conservancy next fall to learn why horseshoe crabs are more spider than crab, how to recognize the web of a writing spider, and all sorts of other amazing facts about Bald Head Island arachnids. Hope to see you then!