Pardosa saltans - habitat, Heeswijk-Dinther, Netherlands

My first hike of the season, after a winter break that seemed to take forever. This particular clearing in a forest I regularly visit is always crawling with small wolf spiders on the forest floor. Hundreds of them. They're very fast, the only way to photograph them is to anticipate their direction of flight. Yet the leaf litter on the floor doesn't help, it's like announcing an earthquake each time I try to sneek upon them.

I always assumed all of them to be the same species. At least in the Pardosa genus, which is a giant genus of hard to identify spiders. This black-and-white striped one seemed distinct enough for identification, and I managed to match it to an ID.

In dutch it has the beautiful name Zwarthandboswolfspin (black hand forest wolf spider). This is the male, females have a yellow stripe instead of white.

Should you desire a little more detail: I managed to catch one and took it home for extreme macro stacking. Will take a while to get to it in the set but I can at least say they're super creepy when magnified.