Getting back home recently after a few week's away, and the heatwave had arrived before me.
The river Witham is only 20 feet away and most summers there would emerge a few dragonflies damselflies to float around the garden at some point, back and forth, in much the manner of a Hawker Siddeley Harrier jump jet, although with significantly less impact on the olive tree or the forever wilting hydrangea bush.
This summer, benefitting from catastrophic and irreversible global warming, has clearly been of huge encouragement to the nymphs, long waiting their moment amidst the plants along the water's lazy edge. The adults are quite abundent and some have taken to coming into the house, (to cool down?). They are quite twitchy which makes them hard to capture with a cup. It might be due to those massive ball shaped eyes which can see everywhere. It might be the overall size but they command far more authority than mere house flies and I feel innately respectful in my efforts to catch them. It could just be the size differential, or else the extraordinary elongated, delicate design. I am in the presence of nature's royalty.
Most, but not all, have a neat, narrow neon blue stripe near the end of their tail-like abdomen, that looks oddly like they have been daintily ringed by some assistant to an zoological study with a fine paint brush - or else they are machines made to look like damselflies, probably beta testing drone warfare tech.
If they are insect-life, research suggests, Once they emerge as free-flying adults, their lifespan is very short—typically just a few days to a few weeks.
Slowly absorbing this information, I eventually wondered, when putting the washing on the line one evening, why, that being the case, dragonflies don't live their short lives with much more sense of an imperative. There seems to be an excessive amount of just floating around going on.
But then again, who am I to talk?
Alternatively, I accept that they may well stare quizzically back at me (creeping up from behind their head) and flick their wings in perplexity at the very idea of living, what would seem to them, a monstrous 1000 years.
Then again, they must be doing something right, after all their species has been around for over 250 million years. (That's enough research for now.)
