Everything’s Comin’ Up Buggy

Everything’s Comin’ Up Buggy

My first summer here was marked by a stately progression of bugs.  Each different bug managed I would say to dominate for about a week.  It’s all a bit jumbled now, but I remember a week of Gigantic and furry Cecropia moths which seemed particularly fond of the upstairs corridor, then a more modest period of electric blue beetles (sort of  Batman black – blue when the light hits it).  Some lemony yellow butterflies.  Something I would call June bugs.  Tiger moths.  It was all too rich, so I just looked forward to the next year, when of course I would carefully note each kind of bug, its arrival and length of stay — draw and diagram each one, that sort of thing.  Then last year, weirdly, there were no bugs.  At least, not in that way.  I didn’t see a single bearlike moth or even one of the carnival colored pink and green grasshoppers.  There were bugs of course, there are always bugs, but not that marching pantheon.

This year is much better.  Every morning there’s a litter of moths to pick through – we seem to be going through a period of green and silvery white ones.  A few days ago a kamikaze beetle crashed into the table in front of Alfred, rattling the crockery.  It turned out to be this rhinocerous-horned, polished-furniture colored beetle.  There’s also a bizarre outburst of parti-colored beetles, of the sort (Cerambycidae I think) that usually show up here all in stately undertakers black.   Just in the last week I have seen one gilded gold, and one whose antennae were bright blue ringed with regular filips of cute black fuzz – a more frivolous antennae I’ve never seen . . . .