One of the natural history "adventures" I can promise visitors to these pages is my ongoing attempt to learn the spiders. That's a group of inverts I've shied away from, largely because they have a reputation for being very difficult to ID without killing and dissecting the critters, and I'm never all that excited about such sacrifice, even in the name of a somewhat worthy cause: my continuing education, which I will then attempt to pass along. I'd mentioned to my son Noah that I was deficient in the spider department, and for the holidays, he somehow found a used copy of Richard A. Bradley's masterwork, Common Spiders of North America, and I was in business... well, as soon as the spiders started appearing. The sun was out in the garden today, and here's what I found. I think it's one of the small Wolf Spiders, and from the looks of the patterning, it might be the ground hunter Gladicosa pulchra. With more time spent looking, I'll eventually be able to remove the "might" from any assessment. Maybe.