All spiders are predatory.

Have a bug book but didn't find this spider in there. Google is a great friend! LOL

"Family Salticidae (Common name- Jumping Spiders): Spiders in the family Salticidae have a distinctive, flat-faced appearance. Jumping spiders also have very large eyes: of all insects and spiders, jumping spiders may have the best eyesight. Jumping spiders are also characterized by a "herky-jerky" way of moving around. In fact, it looks like they are hopping small distances every time they move. Although they hop most of the time, jumping spiders are able to jump long distances as well. Jumping spiders are very common inside homes and in yards and gardens, and are very easy to find. Unlike many other kinds of spiders, jumping spiders are active during the day. Although jumping spiders don't use webs to catch food, they will use a strand of silk to secure themselves when they are jumping long distances."

Over 5000 kinds of these spiders. They eat flies, insects, bugs and other spiders that infest crops. There must be bugs in the yard, but not for long with the sheer amount of these hip-hop spiders everywhere.

So this is a good thing :-)

No spiders eat slugs though. :-)
Those spiders are normal and won't hurt a thing except bugs. Be thankful you have them.

Thanks bboy. I was looking them up. Predatory to what is what I had to find out ...

Salticids are solitary and creep around like felines, even hunting down their prey and pouncing on it in a similar way. I most often see them on house walls. Unlike most spiders these have big eyes and will even turn and look back up at you when viewed closely.

Yours are probably something like the black ones you see on/near rocky and/or sunny places like house foundations. I call them "wolf spiders", probably having seen that term used some time in the past but do not know if they actually belong to that group.

Thanks botann of ideal utopian awesome yard (saw your pics). No spiders eat slugs? That is too bad! I'd get ducks but they'd trample the fleur de lawn and eat all the flowers. Really bad slug problem. Was told bullfrogs also eat slugs but there are no native bullfrogs in western oregon.

Thanks, now really glad there are so many jumping spiders.

If there's anybody on here that lives near Oregon City (Portland) and wants to see a strange watery yard with lots of new trees and give LOTS of advice, post to me, thanks. I have ssooooo many questions!

bboy, these aren't solitary, they're a huge gregarious mass completely blanketing the yard, especially the back yard full of water. Maybe they'd like to be solitary but there's not enough room? I've been weeding and have to crawl around the ground and everytime put hand down oodles of these scamper and hop to get out of the way. Have to walk very slow and pre-brush the grass for each footstep so they won't get walked on. They seem to be living just under the grass / clover and in the tree wells. I can't imagine there's enough insects to feed all these spiders but then again above the cricklets there are swarms of little flying bugs so apparently it's a feeding frenzy jungle out there.

Alarmed to notice some big black beetles scuttling around recently. Don't want anything eating trees or roots. Don't have any squirrels yet, but with 22 bird stations and 300+ trees, imagine when the trees grow big enough to support squirrels they will add to the mix.

Have a little bug book, Bugs of Washington and Oregon, with nice pictures, but it's not complete enough to ID everything out there.

You should not assume that every bug is going to be a pest. Only a very few species, about 1%, are pests. A few more are beneficial and the vast majority are neither pests nor beneficials, they just are. Leave bugs and spiders alone. You want an organic natural yard, you need them. Bugs and spiders are critical components of the food web, for both plants and animals. All spiders are predaceous and most are not picky eaters but none eat slugs - hardly anything does, would you?? Some bugs are predaceous, some are herbaceous, some eat nectar and pollen only, many break down organic matter for plants to use. All are important.

Those big dark beetles could be carabids, which do eat slugs.

I used to have Bugs of WA and OR. It's meant for kids. It's useless for IDing stuff as it gives only a very few species, with no information on what habitats they're found in. Some are from the deserts of eastern WA and OR and won't be found in your yard but they're in the book all together. I got rid of it but I haven't found anything suitable to replace it with. You'll learn the few bugs that are pests and beneficials, and you don't need to worry about the rest. A field guide to insects will help you get a general idea of what things are, like Audubon Society puts out. But you won't be IDing stuff to species except in rare cases. Too many bugs, and it's just not necessary.

Sounds like you had spider egg masses hatch out recently. They'll disperse as they grow.

I had ducks once. They lived in a pen and on spring mornings I'd go around and collect up slugs (with gloves on!) and toss them to the ducks. It did make a major dent in the slug population and the ducks loved it. I had khaki campbells which are easy to keep and they produce very nice eggs, not so strong tasting as people assume duck eggs to be. I liked them.

We have small black spiders in large numbers. They love my straw mulch. They scatter in all directions whenever I do anything with the straw. Maybe that's why I found a young snake in the pile yesterday; lots of good eating if they go after spiders.
We have jumping spiders around too, but I don't see them very often and there are other varieties too. I've only seen one that scared me around here. It was on the garage door near the handle and I saw it when my hand was just a few inches away. It's body alone must've been an inch wide, then add the long, hairy legs to go with the hairy body. I don't think I would've been as shocked if I had seen it before my hand was so close. I've never seen one that big here.

The big one the door was probably a European house spider.

Thanks for the encouragement about every bug not being a pest. I love my trees so much and worry all the time about anything impeding their exuberant growth. There's beetles that eat slugs? Kalloo Kalay, hope they come here. So the bug book is meant for kids -- that's the beginner level I'm at so OK. Your ducks and their eggs sound perfect, but there's no space left here for pens. Only space is trees that have croaked, replacing those with something else. Thank you all for these answers and info, very valuable, wonderful to get answers!

Last year we saw bigger spiders in webs near tree trunks in the yard; these were in the bug book: Yellow Garden Spiders. They have yellow fat bodies with a black pattern on them that looks exactly like an alien from outter space. These big yellow alien-patterned spiders are good for the yard too.

It may have been the house spider. I only found one picture that looked close to what I remember. It's the female that resembles it. I'm giving 2 links in case the lower one doesn't work with such a long addy. Don't look if spiders bother you. http://www.royalalbertamuseum.ca/natural/insects/bugsfaq/hsspider.htm

Here is a link that might be useful: spider

To obtain a confirmed ID, take some of the spiders to the Clackamas County Extension Service office in Oregon City.

I hope you take some samples to the Extension office because what you describe isn't normal activity for any sort of spider.

More likely, they're just seasonal insects of no importance other than they're there.