Quite the construction project

This is going to be a little difficult to document, so try and use your imagination a bit here. We had a week or so of relatively windless weather, which is rather unusual around here. During that week, we watched a spider build a pretty amazing web. Here's a picture of part of the back of our house:


The spider web stretched from that birch tree on the left over to the deck on the right side of the picture! The main part of the web was located about 90% of the way from the tree to the deck. It was anchored to the deck and the post supporting the deck in a couple of places. It was also anchored to the grass below the web. The most impressive part was that there was one super long strand of web stretching all the way over to a branch on the birch tree! We couldn't believe it when we saw it, and we have no idea how the spider managed to do it. Here are some more pictures of the spider's project:

The strands on the left join together about halfway to the tree
and it's just one strand the rest of the way

Another shot of the main portion of the web by the deck

The little artist

Unfortunately, we had to destroy the web after a few days to mow the lawn. The spider got back to work building a new web in a different area of the yard the next day.