But ... did what, though?
Sep. 21st, 2004 05:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaWell, the rest of my flist is writing thoughtful and inspiring and impassioned statements about politics this week, so I'm gonna post about bugs. Not that I don't care about politics--on the contrary. And yes, I do feel that the fate of the world hangs in the balance this time.
But that's for October. This is September, and at the moment bugs are a lot more interesting than Those Guys.
First, I am gonna pimp a website and a book--or rather, repimp, as I have mentioned them before: An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles.
Second, the line was said by the entomologist J.B.S. Haldane: "The creator, if He exists, must have an inordinate fondness for beetles." Because there are so many species of them, you see. Good line, worth quoting.
Tonight is the autumn equinox. Me, I love summer; I cling to it. I offer Vertumnus one more cup of coffee: Stay, I say; have another cookie. Saturn (that sour god) can wait til October with his sickle and wicker basket. Pomona looks at her watch. Honey, she says, the babysitter, the kids, the parking meter. Time's running out.
In New York, September, an undecided lover, blows hot and cold. The days chase the days like Keats's full-grown lambs: hurricane, then sun, then storm again: enough rain to swell the rivers and drive the parks into one last fervent frenzy, one more fruitless effort to make their green eternal. Enough sun--and still warm enough--to light the air with an invisible, smokeless flame. The edges of skyscrapers are sharp and lapidary; the light glancing and pure. These are the kind of beautiful days when everything earthbound wants to take to flight and everything that flies, flies wildly off-course: gulls over the harbor, planes like high sparks above the skyline (yes; I know: it was a day like this), leaves leaping out of trees and into the street; zooming insects.
And then come the katydids. This website claims that "most Orthoptera, or katydids, crickets and grasshoppers, are found in grassland areas because of the types of plants found in open fields. Many species of crickets and katydids that feed on trees are found in forests."
I am here to tell you that this is a damned lie, at least with respect to the katydids. Most katydids are found in my apartment. Come September, come the katydids: not single spies, but in battalions.
"Being discovered often means death for insects," the website cautions. "Katydids are eagerly sought by sharp-eyed and hungry predators, from bats and birds to snakes and shrews."
And, of course, cats. First the chrrup, chip of their late and longing mating call on the evening windowsills, then the agitation of the cats. That's odd, I think, looking up from my keyboard, my coffee, the newspaper. The cats are chasing a large green flying leaf. With legs. And wee bugeyes.
If I can get to the katydids before the cats do, I catch them and toss them out the window, into the wind. They always look mildly affronted. Is this any way to treat a houseguest? I quote the website to them: "To avoid becoming another creature's meal," l explain earnestly, "katydids have had to evolve cunning and devious ways to hide."
The katydids are not convinced. They are hellbent on getting into my apartment, where doom awaits. "Few other groups in the insect world have as wide a range of survival tactics as katydids," exclaims the misguided and overly optimistic website. Alas, wrong again. My visitors are all determined to end life spectacularly in the clutches of the world's most timid cats. Even my loser fuzzballs are willing to eat a katydid.
And how they get up to the tenth floor and past the window screens is a mystery known only to them.
I have a theory, though.
The Romans, despite their imperial ambitions, were homebodies at heart. Under the roof of a prosperous Roman house lived any number of cousins, servants, slaves, and household gods: Forculus, god of doors, Janus, god of doorways, Cardea, goddess of door hinges and keys, Robigus, god of mildew. And the little house spirits, the Penates who kept the larder full and the hearth swept. Not to mention the Larvae, the cranky souls of the dead family members, and the cheerfuller Lares.
The katydids are my Lares, friendly and green, leaflike and harmless, the last breath of summer, blown in on the air of autumn.
"Katydids," warns the website, "do everything from posing as remarkably life-like leaves to mimicking other insects in their attempts to make it through the day without being eaten."
Don't we all.
But that's for October. This is September, and at the moment bugs are a lot more interesting than Those Guys.
First, I am gonna pimp a website and a book--or rather, repimp, as I have mentioned them before: An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles.
Second, the line was said by the entomologist J.B.S. Haldane: "The creator, if He exists, must have an inordinate fondness for beetles." Because there are so many species of them, you see. Good line, worth quoting.
Tonight is the autumn equinox. Me, I love summer; I cling to it. I offer Vertumnus one more cup of coffee: Stay, I say; have another cookie. Saturn (that sour god) can wait til October with his sickle and wicker basket. Pomona looks at her watch. Honey, she says, the babysitter, the kids, the parking meter. Time's running out.
In New York, September, an undecided lover, blows hot and cold. The days chase the days like Keats's full-grown lambs: hurricane, then sun, then storm again: enough rain to swell the rivers and drive the parks into one last fervent frenzy, one more fruitless effort to make their green eternal. Enough sun--and still warm enough--to light the air with an invisible, smokeless flame. The edges of skyscrapers are sharp and lapidary; the light glancing and pure. These are the kind of beautiful days when everything earthbound wants to take to flight and everything that flies, flies wildly off-course: gulls over the harbor, planes like high sparks above the skyline (yes; I know: it was a day like this), leaves leaping out of trees and into the street; zooming insects.
And then come the katydids. This website claims that "most Orthoptera, or katydids, crickets and grasshoppers, are found in grassland areas because of the types of plants found in open fields. Many species of crickets and katydids that feed on trees are found in forests."
I am here to tell you that this is a damned lie, at least with respect to the katydids. Most katydids are found in my apartment. Come September, come the katydids: not single spies, but in battalions.
"Being discovered often means death for insects," the website cautions. "Katydids are eagerly sought by sharp-eyed and hungry predators, from bats and birds to snakes and shrews."
And, of course, cats. First the chrrup, chip of their late and longing mating call on the evening windowsills, then the agitation of the cats. That's odd, I think, looking up from my keyboard, my coffee, the newspaper. The cats are chasing a large green flying leaf. With legs. And wee bugeyes.
If I can get to the katydids before the cats do, I catch them and toss them out the window, into the wind. They always look mildly affronted. Is this any way to treat a houseguest? I quote the website to them: "To avoid becoming another creature's meal," l explain earnestly, "katydids have had to evolve cunning and devious ways to hide."
The katydids are not convinced. They are hellbent on getting into my apartment, where doom awaits. "Few other groups in the insect world have as wide a range of survival tactics as katydids," exclaims the misguided and overly optimistic website. Alas, wrong again. My visitors are all determined to end life spectacularly in the clutches of the world's most timid cats. Even my loser fuzzballs are willing to eat a katydid.
And how they get up to the tenth floor and past the window screens is a mystery known only to them.
I have a theory, though.
The Romans, despite their imperial ambitions, were homebodies at heart. Under the roof of a prosperous Roman house lived any number of cousins, servants, slaves, and household gods: Forculus, god of doors, Janus, god of doorways, Cardea, goddess of door hinges and keys, Robigus, god of mildew. And the little house spirits, the Penates who kept the larder full and the hearth swept. Not to mention the Larvae, the cranky souls of the dead family members, and the cheerfuller Lares.
The katydids are my Lares, friendly and green, leaflike and harmless, the last breath of summer, blown in on the air of autumn.
"Katydids," warns the website, "do everything from posing as remarkably life-like leaves to mimicking other insects in their attempts to make it through the day without being eaten."
Don't we all.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-09-21 03:16 pm (UTC)Ahaha. This was lovely. They really really like you. Or your cats.
Wasn't the weekend odd? Hurricane, wind, fall. Boom. I had been complaining that not only was it not crisp, it was the *opposite* of crisp, alternately soggy and melty as late as last week. Now I got chills!
My flist is not full of political posts this week. I don't know what I've done to craft such an odd list, but everytime someone says, "what's been going on on LJ lately" or "this discussion that's everywhere" I'm all, what? where? Or maybe it's because I only seem to look at the links on katydids and cake. Oh, and on my friend Comice's 1957 Electrolux, that was another high point today.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-21 05:35 pm (UTC)You live near the park, yeah? Interesting. I have a park outside my window, though not your park, I suspect, and yet I have neither cats nor katydids.
On the other hand, I have had achingly sweet breezes, much like one might feel blowing under Roman eaves and through Roman windows at night in but a few weeks hence. My windows have been wide open and my blankets have snuggles with me as though I were a baby in a papoose.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-21 05:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-21 05:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-21 06:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-21 06:34 pm (UTC)We also have lots of herons, though. Four night-herons the other day, and a white one almost all the time and a great blue last week. And tons of songbirds.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-21 11:11 pm (UTC)A favorite NY wildlife story: One night a tiny black-and-white finch flew into my building's lobby and got its legs all tangled up in some thread somehow. It let me catch and untangle it, and then I carried it (unharmed) out to the park and let it go. I've never had an experience quite like that: releasing a wild bird from my hand. It was ... I dunno, some kind of epiphany.
And yeah, very odd weather last few days: "soggy" is right.
I blame the Repuglicans, of course.