Halls of the Dark Muse

I was out taking my walk, and I live down around the foothills, and because I usually go in the morning, I often have interesting various encounters with wildlife though nothing really too exotic but the last couple of times I saw a group of wild turkeys, and once I saw some freshly hatched snake eggs which I thought was cool, and I saw a red velvet ant once which was quite interesting, because I have scene pictures of them but never actually saw one in person before.

There is this paved path that goes through a portion of the hills, and as I was walking along I saw something ahead crawling across the ground on the path, and it looked like some kind of insect, but it looked quite large, so I was wondering what is that?

And when I got closer, it was one of those really big black wasps that have bright red wrings, they are really quite fascinating looking, they are called Spider Wasps and for good reason, as the one I saw was dragging a wolf spider across the trail. At first I thought they were actually fighting, but I think the spider was already dead, as it wasn't moving.

Well I found this scene quite fascinating so I stopped to just watch it, and I guess I was too close to its prey because it began to advance toward me, and while the Spider Wasp does not have a repetition for stinging people they certainly have the capability to do so patricianly if they are in a situation where they feel as if they are threatened in someway, so I started to back up and it started to pursue me, whenever I moved back it kept coming forward, and while they are not typically aggressive, they are quite intimidating looking. So I just kept slowly moving backwards to let it know I did not mean any harm.

I guess I finally moved far enough away from its food source, because it eventually stopped chasing after me and then just began walking around in a protective circle around the spider, and it was directly in the middle of the path, so I was standing there wondering how I was going to get past without aggravating it. And on either side of the path is just dirt and grass from the hills so I just moved off the trail, and walked wide around it and did not linger around its area.