Tarantulas in Colorado go on a deadly quest for love.
Tarantulas are on the look out for a mate. That’s one of the reasons they hunt for food – and they don’t do a very good job of it.
So to get a leg up on the tarantula population in Colorado, we got to get down to the ground and inspect the little tarantula friends, so to speak.
We decided to set up a trap at Little Gem, a state park at the base of the mountains above the town of Vail, near the Colorado Springs area.
And, well, we decided to trap them.
The park is a great spot for a tarantula trap, because the heat is low, and the insects are easy to see. It also offered us the unique opportunity to get our hands on an early spring batch of tarantulas.
A tarantula captured and held at Little Gem State Park in Vail.
The park was in the process of adding a new animal exhibit, called a kennel, where more than 30 tarantulas, including red-bellied tarantulas, could be housed, with cages big enough to hold the babies.
We expected to find them among the many other small animals that inhabit Little Gem Park.
Our state park didn’t open until May 7. The spring season, with its milder temperatures, is still three weeks away.
But we were able to make our way to this state park with a day-hike in our backpacks, scouting a little-known area of the state park where we knew we could find large numbers of tarantulas, and, hopefully, a few tarantula traps.
There was a hiking trail about a mile that wound through the small mountains on the eastern edge of the park, just above the town of Vail. We weren’t sure when the tarantula population would
