THERE’S A Daddy Long Legs – a Crane Fly – sitting on the window of the Tower of Light, most beautiful creature when you look at it closely.
It’s been a leatherjacket for quite some time, gnawing away at grass roots, and then it’s pupated and now it’s flying. It’s so fragile that when you catch one in a house, you have to be careful that its long legs don’t just fall off.
Hard time to fly too, it being autumn and the spiders growing and growing, just waiting for a Daddy Long Legs to fly into a web. No doubt that’s why the legs fall off so easily.
What must it be like to be grubbing around for ages, going to sleep for a while and then finding you’re out in the open air, ready to fly?
There’s still a little wasp flying round here, looking for victims to kill and take back to the nest. Wasps get a very bad press – they only start bugging people when the grubs stop being produced by the queen of the nest and the workers don’t get their sugar ration.
I can’t remember being in my mother’s womb, and I doubt the Crane Fly knows any more than me.
