I suspected them before I saw them. The small front-end loader’s bucket was lowered and had collected a few inches of rainwater, standing now for who knows how long. I got close and sure as rain, the little guys were parking, jetting forward, turning, parking, jetting forward, and parking alongside one another, just little black specks in the shadow of the boom arm.
Lingerie Rope
Was stepping down a set of porch stairs and saw a telltale yellow line running the length of a sinuous body, curving through the grass. Little guy was only a foot long, and made it to safety under the stairs.
This morning I spied him again, peeking out from the low foliage. I paused; he paused; we came to an understanding of interspecies gestural communications.
Cuckoo Wasp
I have learned about the cuckoo wasp, when one was nervously jittering on the bathroom windowsill while I was pooping. The little gal’s body was not moving along any spatial axes but she was unquiet in her idleness. She reminded me of an old military vehicle in metallic green, iridescent, engine running visibly.
This wasp is another one that just injects its eggs into the larvae of other wasps. Like, what even is that? Parasitoid animals freak me out, admittedly. Can’t they survive without murdering babies? In my shame I did not save her, but left her there on the sill to jitter and wonder about the interior landscape.
Door Frog
Well into night time, I spied him from some distance away. The lights in the cabin were shining through all the framed glass, and he appeared to me as a speck and then upon approach, he climbed a little higher, closer to the flitting moths.
Tube Train
Little fella with wavy legs crawled out from beneath the fridge and someone stepped on him, so early in the morning. He crunched lightly and was bleeding when I scooped him up with a magazine with Lil Nas X on the cover. A three-inch millipede! He curled up when encountered the coated magazine paper, and I don’t blame him. My passenger now, I took him out to a plant and gently set him there to unfurl and continue his little circuit.
Blue Muddy Bois
So wasps do some brutal shit. On a sweaty August day they began to invade my room from outside. To be specific, they were the bluish-blackish variety, the jittery ones, and I shit you not these were like an inch and a half long, primordial ones. In one episode of trauma transference, my mother told me that her child self had once breached the surface of a swimming pool, where one of these same wasps was foundering, and it in its panic has stung her on her eyelid and her face. When they began to enter my room, I killed one and then another, and then four more. I looked them up to try to understand why they were coming in.
Turns out they do some brutal shit. These particular ones are mud daubers. They daub full-time, just daubin’ the days away. They find the little mud tubes another dauber species builds and empty them of spiders and wasp larva. Yeah, that’s right: these guys aren’t gonna sting a human, typically, but show ‘em a spider and they punch above weight. These other daubers will make a mud tube, go stun a bunch of spiders, and then pop an egg into the tube. The larva when it hatches will eat its way through the still-living spiders until its wings are well developed. All that happens unless these blue bois show up.
If the blue bois show up, they empty out the tubes and then refill them with black widows. That’s right: they hunt a myth-heavy local spider, not settling for any half-measure nobody crab spider or whatever: it’s gotta be storied or they don’t care. Once the tube is refilled with dangerous arachnids, they poop out their own egg, from which a blue boi larva will spawn with a hunger for red hourglass.
Now, when I see the blue bois coming in, I try to shepherd them out a window or door. I don’t need no wasps but I sure as shit don’t need black widows up in here.
TF is a Yearling?
I was in the car, driving slowly enough to stir up no dust on a dirt road. Off to the driver’s side and down a ditch-bank, in the freezing spring water, stood a spotted fawn. They looked directly at me, just passing on by. I was thrilled! I told everyone, “I saw a spotty little yearling!” and not a single soul, not my wife or anyone, knew what I was talking about. One guy whose intellect I respect asked whether it was a bird, or what have I. He told me, when I told him, “that’s pastoral as fuck”.
In spite of it all, the yearling or whatever was a mood-lifter, if not an omen of any great times.
…
…
…was I the only little kid that read this book? How does no one know this term?
Wisconsin Butterbirders
There is a gang of hummingbirds here. They aren’t special ones, just regular ones with little ruby throats. For them, everything is very dramatic. Life happens at mach speed by our reckoning, but by theirs it all must happen so slowly, too slowly, annoyingly slow all the humans and the bees and everything. They bomb each other and scream and chirp and get jostled off the feeder by the mere approach of another hummingbird. That sets them off, and then they flit over to the flowering bush and yell at someone before settling on the slightest branch-ends, looking quite bothered by the day’s proceedings.