00:00Out on the prairies of southeast Colorado where I'm normally chasing tornadoes but today we're
00:05chasing tarantulas. A sighting! We get out to look at our first of the day but...
00:12This one turned out to be a plastic prank left along the roadside but fortunately the real ones
00:25were not far away. I'm not a big spider fan so that's why we're the tall boots. They don't want
00:31nothing to do with us just like I don't want anything to do with them. Fake or not, each fall hundreds of
00:37male tarantulas leave their burrows in search of females. It is not a migration. It's a mating
00:42expedition. Known as Colorado brown tarantulas, they thrive in these grasslands. We've got here
00:49is beautiful short grass prairie out here on the grasslands and a lot of undisturbed land
00:54and the spiders just love it. This is tarantula paradise. And in this paradise this time of year
01:02it is mating season as the males go on hunt for female mates even if it is the last thing they do.
01:08Sometimes they don't make it away. Sometimes the females will actually consume the male. For locals
01:17the experience is worth sharing with visitors from all over the country. It's truly a natural phenomenon.
01:23see them in their natural landscape. We feel like we've done a really good job of narrowing down
01:30the right location in the right time that we can almost of course we can't guarantee but that we can
01:36almost guarantee you will see a tarantula out in the wild. And most likely they'll be a little bit
01:41more real than this one. It's awesome to just come up and see them. In La Junta Colorado for
01:47AccuWeather I'm meteorologist Tony Laubach.
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