When I approached my car the other day, I saw a patch of something on the door handle. “Bird dropping,” I thought, and was about to wipe it off. Then I noticed that the blotch was symmetrical. Uh oh. I looked more closely. A spider, and a real cutie. I’d have been devastated if I’d hurt it.

This is what it looks like when zoomed in on my camera:

The spider has wrapped itself around the door handle, to be as flat and inconspicuous as possible. The photo above shows the body of the spider. Its head is below, mostly hidden from view. The colours and patterns on the body are amazing. I think they’re enhanced because it had been raining and the spider was wet.

Here’s a picture with my hand and the keyhole, for scale:

I took the above photo the day after the first one. Yes, the spider was still there. It was dry this time, and therefore less colourful. And it had moved from the top to the bottom of the door handle.

Here’s the spider’s face, viewed from underneath the door handle:

And here’s as much of the head and body as I could get into one shot:

Wrap-around spiders (genus Dolophones) have a flat, curved abdomen, so that they can wrap themselves around branches. This makes them good at disappearing into their surrounds. They build an orb web every evening, and destroy it each morning. I guess those strands of web on the door handle are the remains of last night’s web.

Since the spider had been on the door handle for two days, it looked like it had taken up residence. I don’t think spiders and door handles are a good match, so I persuaded the spider onto a leaf and moved it into the nearby shrubbery: