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Home  Browse All Articles Writers Showcase A Note on the Biota Outside My Window
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A Note on the Biota Outside My Window |
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Written by Janet Krenn
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Tuesday, 05 June 2007 |
Sometimes it seems like the whole world's against you. Other times, it is!
This is an essay about fate, fighting it, and constantly guessing at what will bring about your demise.
Picture a common dragonfly: a beautiful blue color, large, of course, but not out of the ordinary. In fact, these insects have fantastic features. Irridescent, kaleidoscopic eyes set on the ends of large telescope-like barrels. It looked as if its entire head existed solely to support its eyes, and that its proportionally smaller mouthparts acted only as an afterthought. I had plenty of time to observe these characteristics because as soon as it came into view, the dragonfly landed right onto the last remaining gigantic spider web.
When I first moved in, I shivered to see the spiders outside our twenty-first floor windows. We probably had hundreds of spiders hanging around, and they were all gigantic. They built huge webs--the small ones were as big as dinner plates. Some spiders, it seemed, had more than one web: a base camp in the corner of one window and a weekend retreat on another. But just during the height of their civilization, my roommate pulled down all of the hubcap-sized webs she could reach and sprayed pest killer on the balcony. After we ruined the spiders' resort they had set up on the balcony, the webs on the windows began to disappear, too. Without the spiders to maintain the webs, the clever traps that we did not tear down collapsed in the rain.
The dragonfly landed on one of the last remaining webs, waited a minute, then noticing it was caught, began wiggling its feet and trying to free itself. The wind blew and pushed it farther into the web, so that its legs, having busted out the other end, were free, but its body was now trapped. Another wind came. Then its wings became stuck. And the dragonfly continued to struggle. It was a cruel cycle of liberating one body part only to entrap another.
Earlier, a spider as big as my thumb fell abruptly into view. With dark hairs visibly silhouetted against the clear morning sky, it seemed to be a sort of pioneer or prospector. Suspended by its silk, it dropped, then retracted. It would fall five vertical feet, then bounce upwards--just as fast and in only a few seconds. Up. Down. Up. Down. The terrifying yo-yo could not make up its mind until it made its fourth trip upwards, and it stayed out of view. I assumed this spider resided outside of a twenty-second floor window and was not quite ready to make the socially degrading downward move. I kept looking upward toward the corners of the window, waiting for the spider to enter the scene and make quick work of the dragonfly saga.
Instead, a hornet about twice the size of the dragonfly came bouncing onto the scene. As the spider, it was unreasonably huge for a post-historic insect. Although it didn't care to pay the dragonfly any notice, the trapped bug refused to take chances and stopped all motion. When the hornet buzzed away, the dragonfly's panic began again.
Over the course of 10 minutes the dragonfly alternated between being very caught and struggling intensely versus being bored and, having come within limb distance of an old gnat carcass, eating. It was flipping around and around, at times getting stuck with its anus in its nose, in a very circular position. The whole time, though, it did not try to flap its wings. This seemed quite ironic to me because this behavior is precisely what got the bug in this mess to begin with, but perhaps it was also the best method for breaking it free.
Toward the end of minute 10 or so, the blue captive was tangled in only a couple of threads but contorted into the circular position again. And from all of the insect’s clawing and wriggling, the small bit of the web that ensnarled it started to fall away. Just when the dragonfly and a bit of adhesive string were hardly attached to the main, larger web, the animal flapped its wings, breaking the last line connecting it to the building, but not affecting its overall predicament of being caught with its ass in its eye.
Now I've been watching it for this whole time, almost without shifting my gaze. And I was really rooting for the thing. So when these events came to climax, I was alert enough to jump out of my chair and lean over the desk hoping that, somewhere between floors 20 and one, it might just break the last couple of strands which were for the moment sealing its fate and fly away.
And it might have, too, had there not been a bird, perched on a window around floor nine, that picked off that dragonfly before it got any nearer to the ground or any less circularly positioned. |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 05 June 2007 )
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