Climb up the water spout? Scaling the Sears Tower is a more likely challenge for those hairy, creepy, black-and-brown spiders that lurk outside windows of city high-rises each fall.

And while they're harmless, try telling that to the window washers who fight them for space each day - or the tony apartment dwellers whose high-rent views are marred by the critters."They're enormous. They get all over you. Some of them bite you. . . . But there's nothing you can do about them," Harold Engel, owner of A-1 Window Cleaning, said last week.

"You knock them down one week and they're back the next. They are a very, very large pain in the neck."

"They're disgusting," agreed Helen Morrison, an attorney who gets the spiders along with other amenities at her 18th-floor condominium on Chicago's affluent North Side.

"Last year, I had a lot of them - and they were ugly," said Morrison. "I just never opened the balcony last year because they were so disgusting."

But some small admiration may be in order for these high-rise trapeze artists - araneus serricatus to the cognoscenti - whose ventures sound more like a children's story than a spider's tale.

Experts don't have a great base of knowledge about this particular spider and don't know, for example, just how common they are in other big cities.

But they say that some of the spiders apparently travel by air across Lake Michigan before taking up residence in Chicago.

As youngsters, the spiders climb to the top of a tall plant, extend themselves on a strand of silk and wait patiently for a draft of wind to balloon them across the lake, said Daniel Summers, an entomologist at the Field Museum of Natural History.

"The high-rise buildings are really just in the way of their flight plan," said arachnologist Louis Sorkin of New York's American Museum of Natural History. "For them, it's like being on a big tree. They set up housekeeping there."

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The winds that blow the spiders to the upper reaches of downtown buildings also blow other small, delectable insects into the elaborate webs woven by the spiders, providing plenty of sustenance, said Summers.

Summers said the spiders, some of which measure an inch across, remain outside skyscrapers until fall, when many of the adults die. Some of the younger, heartier spiders may survive the winter by squirreling into cracks or sneaking inside.

While they'll disappear from view over the winter, next spring new immigrants from Michigan likely will fly in to augment the spider population, he said.

"That's their method of dispersal," said Summers. "You don't want all the babies to stay in one area fighting for the same food."

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