My five year old shares my fascination with flashlights, so I’m always looking for fun ways to integrate them into our activities.
A year or so ago I discovered something really cool and we’ve been doing it ever since- Hunting for Wolf Spiders.
Here in South Carolina, Wolf Spiders are very common, maybe even the most common type of spider.
If you’re not familiar or sure of they are in your area, start here
Wiki link for Wolf Spiders.
These spiders grow rather large with a menacing look, but are relatively harmless.
Also the females carry their hatched babies on their backs, super creepy to observe.
The wildest thing about them, is untill you know how to locate them, you have no idea just what a huge number of them are in your lawn at night, foraging and roaming as they do.
In my 60’x40’ front lawn, on any given night, we can easlity locate 200 or more Wolf Spiders, and this is a suburban neighborhood, not the woods.
Now for how to find them. Wolf Spiders have very large, highly reflective eyes, and they will look towards a light shined at them. If this light is in plane with your eyes, they will look right back at you, their eyes shining and glowing like little green emeralds.
I find it best to use a headlamp for this. But also a flashlight, held to your temple, pointed forward, works well too. Holding the light anywhere else, such as down by your side, or lower on your face, won’t work, you wont see the reflection.
Light source must be as close to and in plane your eyes as possible.
When I discovered this, I searched online because surely others had discovered this too, and of course there were already videos on youtube showing how to do it.
These videos are not mine, and are not great, but you will get the idea and see what to look for.
So try this sometime with your kids (or even by yourself 
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