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| Cockchafer flies in with chainsaw hum | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| The day has been hot and heavy and full of the drones of insects sounding up at their own unique frequencies. In the cool of the evening my muscle memory is still swaying, an artefact from the repeated left and right arc of cutting hay on the meadow bank. All day as I worked I’d watched the bees hum and fumble at the flower heads as I cut down through the cornflowers, ox-eye daisies and yarrow at the field’s edge; a meadow’s measure of summer music. | The day has been hot and heavy and full of the drones of insects sounding up at their own unique frequencies. In the cool of the evening my muscle memory is still swaying, an artefact from the repeated left and right arc of cutting hay on the meadow bank. All day as I worked I’d watched the bees hum and fumble at the flower heads as I cut down through the cornflowers, ox-eye daisies and yarrow at the field’s edge; a meadow’s measure of summer music. |
| At my desk in front of the wide open window I can hear what sounds like the distant hum of a chainsaw, its pitch changing as it cuts through the wood. With alarming suddenness, the sound is upon me, in the room and loud around my ears as a cockchafer flies past my head and settles on the books by a lamp. | At my desk in front of the wide open window I can hear what sounds like the distant hum of a chainsaw, its pitch changing as it cuts through the wood. With alarming suddenness, the sound is upon me, in the room and loud around my ears as a cockchafer flies past my head and settles on the books by a lamp. |
| The remarkable sound and vision of such an animal – disturbingly large and menacing in flight – has led it to be a carrier of all kinds of folklore and of a multitude of names: billy witch, mitchamador, and midsummer dor. Other alternative names, May-bug and June-bug, suggest its short life of six to eight weeks begins earlier in the year. It’s unusual to see them this far into summer. | The remarkable sound and vision of such an animal – disturbingly large and menacing in flight – has led it to be a carrier of all kinds of folklore and of a multitude of names: billy witch, mitchamador, and midsummer dor. Other alternative names, May-bug and June-bug, suggest its short life of six to eight weeks begins earlier in the year. It’s unusual to see them this far into summer. |
| But what strikes one most of all is that the cockchafer (Melolontha melolontha) is a beetle of curious and otherworldly workmanship. Its antennae are long, many-feathered, reapers; its sides and back when exposed in flight are mechanical, interlocking plates; the pointed abdominal terminus appears as a thorn of bronze and shining poison; its elytra – the burnished wing cases – a work of carved and figured mahogany. And when it takes flight it reveals long, translucent wings of curved struts and stretched silk. | But what strikes one most of all is that the cockchafer (Melolontha melolontha) is a beetle of curious and otherworldly workmanship. Its antennae are long, many-feathered, reapers; its sides and back when exposed in flight are mechanical, interlocking plates; the pointed abdominal terminus appears as a thorn of bronze and shining poison; its elytra – the burnished wing cases – a work of carved and figured mahogany. And when it takes flight it reveals long, translucent wings of curved struts and stretched silk. |
| As I press my face close to take in these details of a creature so ulterior, so “other”, it takes flight again and moves along the bookshelf to where a Dylan Thomas poetry anthology lies. I don’t need to open it to recall the line “A stranger has come/ to share my room in the house”. | As I press my face close to take in these details of a creature so ulterior, so “other”, it takes flight again and moves along the bookshelf to where a Dylan Thomas poetry anthology lies. I don’t need to open it to recall the line “A stranger has come/ to share my room in the house”. |
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