Halloween is coming and many people have already put scary jewelry at home. Inflatable bats, plastic spiders, glowing pumpkins, skeletons… There are even those who dig their own graves in area. Lies, or at least that’s what we want to believe. But it is with another element of the exterior that you need to be careful: Web.
In Spain, Halloween decoration is not so common, although little by little this tradition is making a hole in our lives. Few people decorate the outside of their houses, but the truth is, we are already starting to see some gardens surrounded by false webs. And this is a problem, according to experts in USA, because it’s a death trap for birds and other small flying animals.
And the fact is that in fact, false webs work in almost the same way as real ones: catch animals that sit on them. The difference is that when a spider weaves them, they are part of the balance of the ecosystem. If we put them on to get the brightest decoration in the area, the result will be very different. Not forgetting that they also take up much more space, of course.
Beware of the Spider Web on Halloween
In 2015 the organization Rescue of local animalsfrom Santa Fe, California, alerted on its website about the case of a family who found owl screech trapped web which they placed in their garden as part of their Halloween decorations.
Later in 2020 Chantal Thane, a wildlife rehabilitator at the Hobbitsty Wildlife Sanctuary in Ontario, Canada, warned in an interview with MNN that it’s hard for birds to see the thin filaments of Halloween webs while flying. When they are large birds, this may not be a problem. Nonetheless, if they are very light birds, they may not have the strength to break free and fall into a trap. In the case of the screeching owl, it was released by the Society for the Protection of Animals. But not always on time.
If we add to this the blindness of other flying animals such as the bats, the web can be even more insidious. True, they use echolocation, but these thin cords may go unnoticed by them. And yes, bats are the perfect Halloween decor item, but we don’t want a real, dying one in our networks. If we want it, we have a problem.
Then what are we to do?
With all this, the advice of experts is that this type of Halloween decoration is not used. The family that found this owl in their garden have vowed to stop using these elements and are now only placing them outside. homemade paper decorations. But never a web. If we believe that this is an irreplaceable decoration, we can always put them in the housebut never outside.
We must always remember that while cities sometimes seem to be the property of man, urban biodiversity is extremely diverse. Since we live with all these animals, we must learn to look after them. And this also happens, preventing our halloween decoration become a death trap. We agree that a party should be scary, but not in that sense.
Source: Hiper Textual
