Date: Sun, 7 Sep 2003 22:01:50 -0500

Subject: [Odonata-l] Summer Reassessed
 
 Last September I found a Libellula pulchella that was so battered and
lost to the world that it brought the summer down like a curtain. Cocked
low in the morning grasses and dew laden, it was signatory. I have not
seen such a dragon this year. I cannot consciously look for this kind of
thing. It is too hard on the watcher: the dreading, the scanning for the
equinoctial bug. This year the temperature just seemed to shift into a new
realm, marking a turn. Hawks made minikettles over my house, the towhees
shut up like they were stoppered or shot.
 
 This was the first summer where I walked in the world with dragons as
backdrop, as one of the familiar things. I did not have to stop to inspect
every one. Often the flash and turn, the specific gestalt of the thing
told me who it was and then I let them fall back into the mix. Back there
with the bird calls that are part of my basal wiring, the continuous
auditory singsong of the season of heat. I hear them but I don't hear
them, like the tinnitus that only returns when you say its name.
 
 This summer I searched for Robber Flies. They changed the way I tracked
through the world. They became the objects of desire. But while I tromped
and swung at them I did run into several new dragons. A tiny female
Erythrodiplax miniscula showed itself in a mountain pond. A Macromia
pacifica slanted into a perch for me along a trail. I laughed when one
recent Hanging Fly, a Diogmites, suddenly rocketed straight up toward a
Pantala on low cruise. It was going for food or perhaps just showing off
but it also said to me suddenly, "hey, remember those?"
 
 The Anax are still flitting at dusk around my house. The yard lydias
don't look all that worn. And the Pantala flocks look as large and as
nervous as always. Beneath the late Tramea, among the goldenrod towers, I
have begun to pay attention to the hunting wasps. Fabre and Evans and
their books have turned my eye again. Plopped on the ground today,
tracking a stunning iridescent blue wasp that was over an inch long, I
think I ignored the Robbers for awhile. The wasp was dragging a tremendous
Katydid. And these wasps can be judged as much by their colors as by what
variety of bug they take. This haul was too much for any flying thing
short of a hawk. Some of these wasps will take only egg-laden, female
Katys. I think this one qualified. This great blue predator buzzed its
wings so hard it blew the grasses apart. And as I've recently read, this
wasp kept trying to get up and up as high as the stalks would take it so
it could launch itself for a weighted glide downwind, so it could make a
little headway in a powered crash dive. It was trying desperately to get
there, to arrive, to pop this Katydid in a hole somewhere. It was so hard
at work I felt like a shirker. "Where are you going?" I said out loud,
"I'll carry the damn thing for you." Eventually it just seemed to vanish
on its staggering way. I must have looked away or something. Fabre, I
believe, said he had watched his hunting wasps walk on foot with a kill
for a hundred feet or more.
 
 A big Tawny Emperor hatch kept flashing me with orange on the way back.
Tiger beetles were pecking at ants on the beach. Stichopogon, the tiny
Robbers, turned and jerked alertly nearby like small, six-legged dogs.
Yes, I thought, staring at them, I believe that next summer I'll chase
some wasps. I'll try to treat the Robbers like old friends, the dragons
like family, the butterflies like the souls of my former lives. One wants
to stay lost and baffled for every summer season that comes. One wants to
be among things that make you scratch your head. When I am disgustingly
complacent, when I can stand by a river among its stones and flowers and
all its busy nectaring and dying things and look bored with it all, that,
my friend, will be the last season I deserve.
 
 
Herschel Raney
 
Conway, Arkansas