It was chillier than I would have liked for my annual springtime visit to URI's Alton Jones campus to take the Environmental Education Center field staff on what I hoped would be an educational and inspirational trek, and while the amphibians and birds weren't particularly noisy... or evident... we did manage to find some terrific critters in the vernals, namely Fairy Shrimp and Spotted Salamanders, and in the gardens and fields, this glorious spider in particular. As I mentioned earlier, for the holidays, my son Noah managed to get his hands on a reasonably priced, used copy of Richard A. Bradley's masterwork, Common Spiders of North America, and I've now started to put the book through its paces. Spiders are not easy, I told the field crew as we noticed this beauty, which posed on my boot for my 85mm micro lens. I couldn't immediately ID the beast, but I promised that I would check in Bradley when I got home, and, with a minimum of page turning, I quickly discovered that we had been graced with a Nursery Web Spider. I'd seen it before, and I know it's pretty common. Maybe the ID will stick. One hopes.