🍃The charms on the chains of life🕸️
I’m deeply attracted to those remaining places where insect life reigns.
These noisy, twigling, wriggly, knee-high places remind me of me in the early 1950s.
Where grassy meadows do richly teem with countless varieties of colourful insects, winged and not winged.
Long-legged. Short legged. Antennae that wave so thoughtfully.
Huge wings spread out of small wing cases with dizzy quickness.
Compound eyes saturated with alien intelligence.
Knobbly impossibly miniaturised knees. Prehistoric fang-spikes set on dry thighs. Body hair for defence, not warmth.
Respect for the tiny weapons that can hurt small children so much.
I’m a little boy again. I am fascinated to discover and observe brightly coloured, fleshy caterpillars, and moths with rich decorative symmetrical patternings, like colour illustrations from the pages of my Jules Vernes science fantasy book.
Camouflaged crickets with military markings. Crackly green grasshoppers crawling and jumping out away from me, everywhere I walk.
I see these populations using their brains to absorb what their senses say to them. The blood red ones cluster on white cowparsley flowers to feast on tiny nectar pots. Some pause, and are distracted to mount one another.
The stench of cowpats, not repellant to me, sometimes attracts horseflies. I soon learn they can deliver a sting far more powerful than stinging nettles.
Pollen smokes off the grass panickles. The loud cawing of rooks around the crown of the giant elm tree. Is it hunger? Fright? I am curious about their recognition of stimuli whose inflows are invisible and unknowable to giant little me.
In response to their needs, insect innards compel them like lightning into unprovoked instant propulsion.
Zero-to-Cheerio in less than the blink of my eye. Gone. Undiscoverable except to their own kind!
See them all today. They are in perpetual motionlessness.
See them exposed in thin rows and rectangular ranks. They are pinned to white boards under sheets of glass in the reference shelves of natural history museums.
How long ago was this great gleaning? Not long after me, a little boy, utterly lost to wonder, had gone away to be schooled.
Not a long time later, almost all would be disappearing. Insufficient numbers for a quorum, let alone for a tapestry carpet of rowdy noise.
Imperial Chemical Industries and others began to send swarms of besuited salesmen out into the countryside.
They rode their cars through puddled single track lanes to offer the farmers guaranteed yield increases and government approved blandishments impossible to ignore.
I do so love insects, specially insects in huge gatherings in long grasses together.
Their noisy and visible presence are blessings on us humans.
They signal to us by their sounds, by their intermittent reveals from out of hiding, and by their flashes of semaphore sightings that theirs is the dance of fecundity in the Big Green – the precious green space we all of us share and completely depend on – the natural ecology
~ Love is present EveryNow
The View at 72+ 