My lunchtime dragonfly

Late lunch today. Wanted to get over the hump on what I was working on. Beautiful day, by the time I got out: sunny, 60º, some breeze. It was window down weather. Big bug came in the truck. Saw it and heard it, over my left shoulder.

After confirming I hadn’t trapped something offensive like a horse fly between my back and my seat, I quit thinking about it until after I got my lunch, and then thought to look. A big, bright dragonfly was in my back seat floorboard.

I thought she was too still to be alive. I wanted to get a look at her, so I slid a piece of paper under her to pick her up, thinking that would be less likely to tear her up—and she resisted. Oops, not quite dead. (Dragonfly legs are surprisingly torquey, by the way.) I got her up on the seat, and saw that her mortal wound was a broken abdomen. She must have clipped the window frame or something. See the fissure where the taper concludes?

I wanted to take her home to share with the boys, but I didn’t have a handy way to put her down that would preserve her body. So it was a quick photo, and then she was off to dragonfly heaven.

Now on account of her affection for these creatures, I wish I could say I’d been thinking of something Mrs. Chili had written or somesuch at the time. But I wasn’t, and it’s not my style to dress up the story with a false detail. It was interesting enough to me just the way it happened.

You might also like:

• Our Saturday night dragonfly at the beach
  So we watched the Alabama-Arkansas game from the seventh floor of Gulf Shores Plantation, with the b…
• A visit (or two) from a tiger bee fly
  A tiger bee fly (Xenox tigrinus) came to visit me just outside my office on Tuesday (thanks to the f…
• There’s a black widow serial killer in the shed
  When last I left the shed, I had counted five black widows in it. Three of them were guarding egg sa…
• Gulf Shores 2010
  The boys’ fall break was today and yesterday, so we’ve been in Gulf Shores since Friday night. This …
• The 13-year cicada visits again
  I bet it’s exactly the same one, too. Heh. This one flew into my open car window as I was arriving a…