What do you do when your subject gets eaten alive?

[Javelin]

Theres been a spider growing large in my shed for the last few weeks. finally I saw him on his web but facing right side up. (they are usually upside down) his web was close to the ground and extended up to the rafters and finally he was in a great position to get a macro. so I go get my tripod and flash, get everything set up with my 100mm and the camera is about 6" from the spider. he hasn't moved a bit. I go to take the lens cap off so I could compose and get the flash position right but when I look up, a bird had landed right inside the door (grackle) so I thought wow I can get a decent picture there too. but as soon as I swung the camera around on the tripod the dern bird grabbed my spider and few away...

[David Kilpatrick]

You find another spider or half a dozen, and set them up with spider real estate to build their webs, and wait for the grackle to come back with your hair-trigger responses ready to catch the moment. If your grackles are like Caribbean grackles, they will eat anything, but a real spider would be better than a breadcrumb stuck on a disused web! We don't have grackles in Britain, closest behaviour is probably our starling, closest appearance, our blackbird (I know that in Barbados they call the grackle a blackbird, probably because that's what early settlers decided it was most like).

David

[Javelin]

never really crossed my mind to set these shots up like that .. your right though I could get a lot more shots in shorter time baiting things or setting them up.

[KevinBarrett]

Something similar happened to me this afternoon! I was walking through downtown Fort Worth and saw a mob of male pidgeons harassing a female. In the time it took to switch from my walkaround to the beercan they had finished their, uh, business, and the hubbub was over.