Early one morning a few weeks ago, I encountered a huntsman spider on the bannister of a staircase inside my house. I was coming up the stairs from below, and was moving my hand along the top of the railing as I went. Then my head came level with the railing, and there was the spider at eye level.

First wildlife close encounter of the day, and I hadn’t even been outside yet! Life in Oz. 🙂

This is a big spider, about the size of the palm of my hand.

It looked as surprised as I was!

It was still dark and the lighting in this area of the house isn’t bright. I didn’t like using the flash on my phone too much, in case it damaged the spider’s eyes, so I found a torch. Hence the bluesy tone of this next photo:

Huntsman spiders are big and scary, but they avoid contact with people if they can, and their venom isn’t too bad if they do bite. They won’t kill you, like some of the other Australian spiders.

Huntsmen generally run away from humans. They don’t go out of their way to bite unless actively threatened. This one might have had good reason to feel threatened by my hand coming towards it along the bannister, though!

And though we see them fairly often and I know they always run away, I do admit to uttering a restrained (not so much) gasp when I saw this one at eye level.

I was heading out for a walk, so I left the spider there, on the bannister, with a scribbled note next to it saying “spider” and an eloquent arrow, so that my husband wouldn’t have the same close encounter that I did.

When I came back, the spider had gone and my husband hadn’t seen it. Who knows where it is now? I’m sure I’ll see it again some early morning!