The Dragonfly Maternity Ward: Part II

…Beyond that playful, Yellow-breasted Chat in a riverside snag just upstream who seemed determined to study and taunt me without being seen, most obvious were the emerald green dragonflies. Correction; damselflies.

Continued:

There was one, blue-bodied male who kept perching up on one of a handful of streamside blades of grass and branchlets, and then there were a steady procession of same-sized, greenish-bodied beauties (River Jewelwing Damselflies Calopteryx aequabilis), who fluttered and zipped around at the edges of my awareness.

I was rinsing out my oily, sardine can with river water and sandy mud when I noticed one of those green-bodied damsels in distress. She had tipped over on the water, and despite the surface tension supporting her transparent wings, her body was completely submerged, including her head. I do believe she was drowning.

Perhaps I should have simply watched, letting nature take its course. Instead, instinctively, I reached out and slid my fingers under her submerged body, lifting her through the air between us until she was just eight or ten inches from my face, there to speak encouragements to her and offer my assistance. Her body moved slightly and her wings shuddered. She was not dead. I dabbed the water off her with my unbuttoned sleeve and held her in a pool of sunlight. Slowly she began to revive. Within minutes, she was perching upright on my finger studying me intensely, or so it seemed and I was talking to her in an alien language that included as many soft vowel sounds and hopeful intentions as I could manage.

My goodness, she was beautiful!

We sat like that for several minutes while she warmed and dried, and began to revive. While all that was going on I watched as another female landed on the same patch of submerged, riverine foliage and began probing tentatively with her ovipositor, as if looking for something by feel, before finally pushing her abdomen deep into the water, presumably to deposit her eggs. She clung to a bit of submerged vegetation, head and thorax, parallel to the water’s surface, abdomen/ovipositor arched steeply downward. This went on, with occasional adjustments for a few minutes before a bit of a shudder and then she tipped over too, just like the damsel before her.

Wait, what? Is this how it goes? Do these damselflies give their all and then expire immediately after laying their eggs? Is this a thing? Seriously? Like salmon?

I watched her surrender and begin to sink, her wings flattening against the surface of the water while her body slowly slipped beneath. No! No! No! Not again!

My new friend, the one clinging to my finger seemed pretty alert and pretty well recovered so I moved my hand to a tall blade of grass and encouraged her to step off. She transferred onto this wide green blade and steadied herself. Encouraged by her recovery I reached out and lifted this second toppled sister gently out of the cool water, offering her the same actions and encouragements that had worked before.

As I was dabbing her wings dry with a paper towel I’d packed with my lunch, my first patient spread her wings atop the swaying blade of grass, fluttered them a few times and flew away. Hooray. I followed her path with my eyes to a branch reaching several feet out over the water where she posted up in warm sunlight, swaying in the gentle river breeze and regathering her senses. And out there on that same branch, spaced a foot or two apart, two or three other identical looking damsels, each posted up, sitting parallel to the water below. How had I not noticed this before?

One of them took off and flew directly toward me, low, darting and hovering then above the submerged patch of aquatic vegetation the others had used as their landing pad, only to be met with an aggressive head butting, collision and herding behavior imposed by the blue, damselfly male who’d been standing guard from his streamside perch like a bouncer at some exclusive nightclub for the past several minutes.

“What the heck, bully boy?”

Two or three feints and parrys, and a couple of herding bumps later the female settled onto a branchlet of the submerged vegetation and curled her abdomen high into the air before bending it downward and slipping it well beneath the surface. Up and down her egg depositing abdomen moved, probing the foliage below and then, when some unseen condition was met, some mysterious signal, she moved into that concentrated-seeming, trance state that I’d seen the others shudder into and held it for at least a full minute, with one long, last, deep thrust into the watery unknown before spreading her wings and flying away.

So apparently not everyone falls over and gives up the ghost after pushing out all those eggs, I marveled, relieved that maybe I wasn’t just another silly human being trying to fix something that isn’t broken.

My second emergency room patient was recovering handsomely by this time, sitting in perfect damselfly posture and studying me rather intently. Then without even a hint of warning she too was away.

During those previous fifteen or so minutes I’d seen a handful of caddisflies bouncing upon the passing water’s surface several feet out, laying eggs in their unique way, but there were not nearly enough of them to wake up those subsurface trouts’ attentions, so there was certainly no big hurry to get back out into the current and start tossing flies again. The fish still did not care. And this little streamside maternity ward with its stunning, jewel-winged patients had completely captured my attention.

I decided to get more comfortable, to lean back, grow quiet and simply watch the ongoing miracle at work. And, well, if the sandman in the form of a brief, post lunch nap decided to sneak in and steal me away for a bit, so much the better. A riverside nap in dappled sunlight with birdsong sounded almost perfect.

Fickle sleep said “Nuh-uhhh. Not today, fish boy.” Then tossed a couple more emerald green damselflies into both my field of view and that bossy-cow blue male’s, and things just got curioser and curioser. He darted out and began herding the arriving girls again, butting them and then seemingly directing them just where to set down. His pushy antics kinda riled up some part of me that doesn’t much like watching some guy bullying the gals but I decided to keep my mouth shut and my mind open; there might, after all be something going on, some dance or process worked out over millions of years that I just needed to keep my big, opinionated nose the hell out of. And so I did, choosing to merely watch from the sidelines, instead.

At least two dozen female Jewelwings arrived, prepared and then submitted to the insistent commands of that blue bully over the next hour, the ward nurse/air traffic controller and event organizer who kept things orderly and quite probably made sure the future of River Jewelwings along that magical river would continue into the future as vibrantly as possible. No two females were allowed to accidentally lay their eggs atop one another, lessening their kind’s chances of survival. A tough guy with spatial awareness and apparently some big picture birthing plan was seeing to that and I was watching. Who’d have guessed there was such planning and organization to a damselfly community’s maternity wards or further, that there even were such things?

I’m still in a state of delight and awe at all that I was allowed to witness.

The Caddisfly hatch I’d convinced myself I was waiting for never did happen. After a while the damselflies stopped coming for their prenatal appointments and I waded back out into the faster water to fish for another couple of hours, working methodically down to my usual ‘gettin’ out spot, never once bringing another fish to hand. But way down beneath the surface of me, in that place where the little flame continually flickers and burns, I honestly could not have cared less. I was full to the brim, absolutely delighted just to be standing there in the river, feeling its tug and pull, listening to the whistle of Merganser wings flying past, just a foot off the water, watching the Osprey circle and dive. Immersed in those warm, golden moments held together by moving waters and a world of wonders yet beyond my imagining.

And then, just after arriving back at my truck and beginning to roll toward camp, an absolute bonus of an encounter sunning itself in the middle of the road. Fat, absolutely calm and a sagey tint of green that I have never, ever seen in a rattlesnake before. I got out and tried to reason with him/her explaining that the middle of a gravel road, no matter how warm and lovely is not a healthy place for a rattlesnake, even on a quiet Tuesday evening. Then I drew upon the lessons I’d learned from that blue, male Damselfly a bit earlier and nudged this green creature closer and closer to the safety of the far side of the road.

Somehow my energy must have come off as extra calm and non-threatening, because this stunning being never once rattled at me, never once coiled or threatened in response. Standing in a river for hours will do that for a fella if you let it; strip away all the bluster and bullshit. Drop you down into that connected, grounded place where the really good stuff can find you without getting weird.

And so it did.

There will be fish enough on some other day.