Dragonflies

I am sitting on the porch this morning in the early morning sun. The dog, as usual, curled up nearby, my wife is still asleep, as is my youngest son.

The latter works for a major caffeine pusher, so the coffee I'm drinking is particularly good I am enjoying the dark, rich bitterness of something poetically called Komodo Dragon as I listen to the birdsong and watch the shadows ooze slowly across the shaggy grass and the flower beds.

It's warm and not yet humid, but I can feel the potential for a muggy day on my skin. In its way it is a perfect moment of pleasure.

It occurs to me that it might help people visualize the scene if they knew what I look like. I am a big man though not tall. I am what you might, diplomatically, refer to as "burly" ... barrel-chested, a bit heavy, everything about me, everything that you can see that is, is a bit over sized. Legs, feet, arms, hands, fingers, head, all seem a little large. My shaggy, graying, black hair (well overdue for a trim) is thinning a bit on the top, and I have a full, mostly gray, beard. (When I let my beard grow and wear a hat I can easily be mistaken for a Hasid.) Today I am wearing denim shorts, a short-sleeved olive-drab shirt and a pair of cheap sandals.

The porch that I am on is a mess. The paint is peeling and some of the floorboards are rotting. It reminds me that the roof needs repair and that there is a dead pine that needs to be cut down. Having acknowledged my failure as a handyman, I put the thought of repairs out of my mind and just enjoy the sun and the sound and movement of wind, branches and birds. In spite of all the motion and sound it is a kind of stillness. I am absorbing the day like a sponge.

But then ... 

A small, swift motion catches my eye. A tiny flicker of brilliance flashes in the sun. It darts this way ... stops ... then that way ... then, in a fraction of a breath, it leaps towards me and lands on my bare knee.

It is a dragonfly. It is about two and a half inches long and an iridescent blue. Its transparent wings, wings that look too fragile for flight, quiver briefly and then go still as it sits quietly in the patch of sun on my right knee. An instant later, seemingly from out of nowhere, my left knee is similarly adorned with another jewel-like insect, but this one is green.

It has been a wonderful summer for dragonflies. They are everywhere. They flit across the gardens and sun themselves on the clothesline and in the bare dead branches that I have not yet pruned from the small beach plum tree in the middle of the yard. A few days ago there were so many of them on the little tree that it looked like it was jeweled. Intense flashes of green, blue and red covered every branch.

They are so beautiful and inoffensive. They seem the gentlest of creatures, but there is an interesting dark side to them as well.

Some years ago my oldest son and his cousin went off one morning with a bucket to gather creatures from a local pond. They came back with a few small minnows, some tadpoles, and an odd but dangerous-looking water bug with bulbous eyes and nasty-looking jaws. This last creature lurked in the bottom of the bucket. Quite an interesting haul, and they displayed their collection to me proudly.

The boys put the bucket outside the back door while we had lunch at the kitchen counter. We heard some splashing. "The fish are trying to escape," said my son, and went out to check on them. He came back in a moment later, eyes wide.

"Dad," he said, "You gotta see this."

The bucket was empty except for the bug which was near the surface and looking very much like an H.R. Giger alien. Small fragments of tadpole and fish drifted around it, slowly sinking to the bottom.

We got out our tattered and stained natural history guide. It took a while, but we finally found that the voracious little monster-bug was a dragonfly nymph, an aggressive predator that eats other insects in the water (including each other), small fish and tadpoles. They catch their food with a toothed lower lip that shoots out in a flash to grab its prey and pull it back to the rest of the waiting mouth.

I bet Giger knew about them.

What’s interesting about the Dragonfly Nymph?

What's amazing is that most of the dragonfly's life is spent in this form, eating and moulting for years before crawling out of the water and moulting one last time to become the delicate creature that sits on my knee.

Even as an adult they are predators though. Now their prey is smaller, mosquitoes, gnats and other small flying insects.

Richard Feynmann in his book "The Joy of Finding Things Out" talks about how knowing how things work adds to the aesthetic enjoyment of their beauty. I must admit that knowing the yin and yang encompassed by the life of this flying jewel makes my delight at having one on each knee in the early morning sun all the greater.