Today a ruby red dragonfly appeared. It was the first sighting of the summer - flying over the surface of the pond and around the edge in lazy loops; occasionally zooming off into the neighbor’s yard and returning again, darting here and there the way dragonflies do, flying straight up in the air.
The pickerel weed, moored at the shallow end of the pool, seemed to hold a special interest for him, he rested there, maybe drank some nectar. Maybe, but probably not - dragonflies are predators.
They grab bugs out of the air with their extendible mandibles, take them back to their perch and eat them head first. A dragonfly’s wings are made out of super strong chitin (like the exoskeleton of bugs), and have veins running through them to give them extra strength and flexibility. They can change the shape of their wings and the angle of attack while they’re flying! They have huge eyes with thousands of lenses and can see 360 degrees at 200 frames per second, much faster than humans. They can catch anything they want.
If dragonflies were the size of humans, they would be the most fearsome predators on earth. Maybe they were that big, back in the dinosaur days, the Cretaceous Era, when everything was big and getting bigger and the earth was warm and there were shallow seas and swamps everywhere. They have found fossils of dragonflies with 30 inch wing spans, that’s almost half the size of a man. There were probably bigger ones. That would have been amazing - to see a giant dragonfly cavorting in the sky, to hear it’s giant wings buzzing in the air, beating thirty times a second.
But this ruby red dragonfly has only a 4 inch wing span. It poses no danger to me, only to midges and flies and mosquitos and smaller dragonflies. Nature has placed humans sort of in the middle, there’s not too many things that can eat us. Of course we can eat anything we want. WE are the most fearsome predator on earth.
Last year there were several ruby red dragonflies flying around the pond and some small blue ones. This year there’s only one of each, so far. Maybe the nymphs didn’t survive over the winter. We had that terrible freeze. The vagaries of being a dragonfly and spending months or years in the water as a nyad. Not until the day it feels the urge to reach for the surface and start breathing air does it begin to enter into the dragonfly phase. And that only lasts for a couple weeks.
Life is short and fast. He doesn’t have alot of time to practice flying, he has to get laid and fertilize some eggs (assuming he is a male). If she is a female, pretty much the same thing, grab a guy and procreate. If there’s only one, that could be a problem.
There are other critters that live at the pond or who have lived at the pond at one time or another, a frog, a turtle, the lesser green heron who loves to eat the small black fish, an anole.
They all have their lifestyle and their strategy for survival and a fair chance to make it. For the turtle, its strategy was to hike on out of here and find a mate. My neighbor down the street told me he saw it and his friend picked it up and transported it to the turtle pond on the golf course where, presumably, it found a hook up.
Human beings, of course, have the best strategy of all: we control nature for our own benefit. We air condition our houses when it’s hot and heat them when it’s cold. We grow food with fertilizer. We clean the water so we can drink it. We filter the air so we can breathe it. We are the crown of creation and on top of the food chain. We are the king of the animals, they don’t dare cross us. We’ll shoot em.
Back in the Cretaceous Era, when dragonflies were half as big as men and dinosaurs were tromping about, our ancestor was an innocuous little furry creature running through the trees like a squirrel.
That was a long time ago. We’ve moved up. We managed to survive. The dinosaurs did not. The dragonflies did. They got smaller and we got bigger. Everything changes.
I’m happy to see the ruby red dragonfly, even though it’s late in the season. I’m happy to see all the critters. I’m happy to see humans. Usually they are riding around in their cars, but sometimes you see them.
a ruby red dragonfly