Rod Crawford’s Spider Collector’s Journal is what happens when field notes are given URLs instead of being left in filing cabinets. The site follows collecting trips stretching from the 1980s into 2026, backed by a research effort Crawford says began in 1971.
Source: Spider Collector’s Journal
The journal is organized by year and expedition. Entries cover ordinary Washington collecting trips as well as journeys to the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin Island. Many years have photo albums, and the main page explains that much of the material originally appeared in Scarabogram, the newsletter of Scarabs: The Bug Society.
The Tools Are Part of the Record
The site’s equipment section is unusually useful. It photographs and names the working tools of arachnology: a screen sifter, field forceps, brush, beating net, specimen vials, a surplus ammunition belt repurposed for collecting, a Berlese funnel, pitfall-trap materials, a modified trowel, field notebooks and a Magellan 2000 GPS receiver.
There is also a Wild M5 microscope and a vial-storage system. This is not a generic “how to find spiders” page. It documents the actual workflow of building a research collection.
Crawford says the specimens support the Burke Museum’s research collection and help answer basic questions: which spider species occur in Washington, what habitats they use and how they are distributed.
The scale is revealing. The 2026 page says Washington is divided into 2,195 one-tenth-degree areas for the project. At that point, 802 had been sampled and 1,393 remained.
A Website That Keeps Growing With the Research
The main page was updated in April 2026 and includes links to 2026 fieldwork. That makes the site something rarer than a frozen old homepage: it is an old-style website still being used for active scientific documentation.
Its structure has barely any need for modern presentation tricks. Years are links. Trips are narratives. Tools are photographed. Locality data is explained. If you want to know why the collecting matters, Crawford tells you directly.
That combination of personal voice and research utility is exactly what makes the independent Web valuable. The archive is readable by a curious visitor, but it is detailed enough that the methods, equipment and geographic logic remain useful to specialists.
Original site: https://crawford.tardigrade.net/journal/