I don’t know if @bothrops07 and @JeremyHussell mind my endless pestering with questions and repetitive @ mentions (if they do they’ve been too polite to tell me to go away) but I realized that part of why I bother these two generous souls more than others is because I am too afraid to get a dedicated spider field guide and through my interactions with them I learn whatever I learn and they make IDs and teach me things. That’s great and I’m super grateful but if there was a spider field guide for only Salticidae (Northeast North America?) with a key or other tool(s) that was simple enough for amateurs to utilize I could probably start making my own IDs and being more spider-self-sufficient and less annoying.
Spider people, does such a nice little guide exist? I have a few insect guides that have some scary spider photos which sometimes prevent me from opening them and risking the view I can’t turn away from. If I could get my confidence built a little maybe my journey towards fear of no spiders will gear up. It would provide me a sense of control knowing I could look at pages of jumpers without running into obscenely large, terrifying, “I see you looking at me, Mira…I know where you live,”-type, spiders.
I’ll post whatever suggestions percolate here in the favorite field guides topic too. I’ll also post the question there in case others won’t see this thread.