I live in the forest in Virginia.

If you go outside at night and shine a bright light, you’ll see hundreds of little green sparkles - the green color you see if you burn copper. I always thought these green sparkles were water droplets, dew, on the leaves on the forest floor.

One night I noticed that a particularly large sparkle seemed to move a little, so I bent down to see it closer.

I discovered that the green sparkles were the eyes of wolf spiders, these large but harmless spiders that are common around here.

I then realized that ALL of those hundreds of green sparkles were spiders’ eyes. Hundreds and hundreds of them.

And then that big one made a run at me.

I got back in the house real quick.

So, yeah: those woods in the picture are probably full of thousands of spiders, you just can’t see them in this photo.