How I spend Friday nights

Licentious River Behavior

Diablo Cody (screenwriter who wrote 'Juno') said her writing career took off after she changed the content of her blog from the mundane to chronicling the year she spent as a stripper.  Then tons of people read her. A hollywood agent contacted her after reading her blog, which lead to her Juno opportunity.
 I don't have steamy, sex-saturated content to blog about. Except what I observe.  It's early summer. Everything seems to be pairing up right now... (Except me. But that's okay. It gives me time to watch other stuff)  So I was lazily kayaking on the river, pondering this when these two damselflies happened by, right in the middle of their mating ritual. They found my leg as good a place as any to have sex. It's an odd ritual. It looks like the male attaches to the back of her head, but that is just a positional thing. Before doing it they spend quite a bit of time connected to each other. I know this because I looked it up when I got home. This is my exciting Friday night activity. Observing insects having sex then looking it up on the internet.  After they consummate their union (Diablo would have put it quite differently) the male flies off and the female rests; then hunts for a stagnant water body to lay her eggs. The larva that emerges will spend from 1-3 years in the water, feeding on other insect larvae such as mosquitoes. Once it emerges from the larval stage into an adult, it has just weeks to live before it mates and continues the cycle. So my two maters are short-lived.  It was an honor to have hosted a part of their union. Life is short lived but oh what a ride.


Soon after these two humans canoe'd by.

I had a brief moment of feeling alone...and was about to burst out in that awful '70's song by Eric Carmen "All by myself....don't wanna be....all by myself.....anymore" when serendipitously yet another damselfly landed on my leg.
Their eyes are set further apart than dragonflies, and they keep their wings folded down when resting, whereas dragonflies wings stay spread out. Smaller and less powerful, damselflies are the delicate cousins of the vibrant dragonfly.
I feel sorry for the males.  Must be hard, being a male DAMSELfly.  They must get teased by their dragonfly cousins alot.

It and I hung out together for awhile. It occurs to me that maybe it's a she who just mated and was resting before finding stagnant water to lay her eggs. Or maybe it's a he scouting out a new partner. Whatever. Things come and go. Wax and wane. Ebb and flow.


~CAnne