Uh oh: Mysterious web covers Hawke's Bay woman's lawn, but no spiders to be seen

Keiasha McGhie said the web was floating as the wind came in. Photo / Keiasha McGhie

A Hawke's Bay resident woke up on Thursday morning to find a massive spider web had taken over her lawn.

Keiasha McGhie said she wasn't quite sure what she was looking at when she got up and looked outside the window of her Te Awanga home.

"I could see the lawn was shimmering in the sun and it looked cool but we thought it was a bit of dew on the grass making it shimmer," McGhie said.

"When we realised it was spider webs it was crazy, I went to go take photos of it and then the wind picked up and you could see the entire array of webs just slightly float in the air - it was amazing."

She said it was astonishing to think it had been made in a single night, covering a 20 metres squared area.

"They must have been busy for most of the night because I didn't see anything when I went outside the night before."

There wasn't a single spider in sight when she went out to photograph it, she said.

Keiasha McGhie said it was quite amazing to see how much they had covered in such a short time. Photo / Keiasha McGhie

Curator at Canterbury Museum and spider expert Cor Vink said although a web like it was not regularly seen by the public, it was a common thing for spiders to do.

"It's a process called spider gossamer, or ballooning, which is when spiders, mostly young spiders, create a cast of web to help travel in the wind which is what has happened here.

"There is so much because when they do this process they normally do it in large groups," Vink said.

"Something like this they could have made in a matter of hours because there could have been hundreds even thousands of spiders building this cluster."

He also said that the weather on Wednesday night would have been perfect for them to build their web, with it being slightly warmer after a wet period and with a light breeze would have helped them even more.

Vink said he had seen some very impressive clusters over the years.

"I've actually seen some much bigger cases, some I've seen cover an entire field and it looks like it has been snowing when instead it's just a web."

The web had broken up and blown away by mid-Thursday afternoon.