One of the many signals of springtime is the awakening of various critters that have been lounging about in some other form. They oftern have a story that belies the obvious.
The most persistent of you patient readers may recall my previous writings on springtime critters. If not, I refer you to Springtime: It’s: It’s Not All a Bed of Roses published March 28, 2007 wherein I recounted the life and death of the most vernal of creatures….the June Bug (Melonthinae Phyllophago).
My attention was redirected to this virulent springtime pest when I approached my office at the ranch yesterday morning and learned that I had not only failed to close the door tightly, but I’d also neglected to turn the lights off. Both of those failures were more than enough for S. to commit me to the penalty box for a five minute major, but worse yet, created an environment in which squadron after squadron of kamikaze June Bug had terminated their final flight on my screen door. The resulting detritus on my porch created a small minefield of crunchy brown bodies that I had to delicately pick my way through to get to my desk and computer.
As I considered the fate of these bothersome creatures, I thought of other creatures which appeared with the warming of the springtime earth and air. In particular, my mind wandered to one of the most mysterious and delightful insects of my youth, the dragonfly (Odonta Epeprocta). There are many reasons to delight in these marvels of genetic engineering. To start with, they see with multi-faceted eyes and fly with not one, but two pair of transparent wings. To interpret for those of you biologically challenged types, that means they can see in multiple directions without moving their eyeballs (which would be a great asset for a guy on the beach), and their wing structure allows them to hover, and some allege, fly in reverse. I know you’ve seen them hanging around a nice spring day, often in coupled form. This unusual flying coitus greatly titilated me in my pre-adolescent youth, but did not stop me from my periodic dragonfly hunt. More on that later.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, the dragonfly has at least two other interesting anatomical features. First a little dragonfly background. Their larvae are laid underwater, and subsequently hatch as nymphs in this aquatic environment. While in naiatic form they breath through gills that are located in their rectum. (I want to meet they guy who discovered this little tidbit and ask him exactly what he was looking for in a dragonfly’s butt). In addition, they move about by rapidly expelling water thru their anus. Just think, when one dragonfly shows a little pique in conversation with his bud and says, “blow it out your *ss”, his bud does exactly that and scoots off to a more favorable clime. It could only happen in nature.
Back to dragonfly hunts referred to above. I don’t know why I hunted dragonflies, I just did. I guess it’s what twelve year olds do in the spring. My weapon of choice was a homemade device fashioned from scraps of wood, a clothes pin and sections of inner tube. I made a pistol-like thing from attaching two pieces of wood fashioning a gun barrel and pistol grip. To the back end of the barrel, I afixed a clothespin. You can think of it as a sort of crude firing pin. Small circles of inner tube became the ammo. You looped one end of the tube over the barrel. Stretched the tube back to the clothes pin, and clamped it with the jaws of the clothes pin. When you got a dragonfly in your sights (or two if you were lucky), all you had to do was depress the lever of the pin and, voila, a trophy dragonfly for my cigar box. It also worked, but not as well, for locusts and bumble bees.
I thought earlier this week to replicate this weapon of my youth, but alas, while I could find scraps of wood, evidently neither clothes pins nor inner tubes exist today. Another in a litany of things I can no longer do, but I used to could. And to think of it, I’m not really all that sad about it either.
