One last holiday in the sun for this kinship of bluebottles

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/11/bluebottles-sun-wenlock-edge

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The bluebottle settles on limestone in the sun. It is a fine day, mild for December, and the warmth of the stone attracts the last flying insects above the quarry. There are several dark metallic-blue flies about, communicating by pheromones as they do when hunting together. They're reading the air for the scent of fungi such as stinkhorn – dead man's cock – or faeces or corpse. There is no time left to lay eggs and little to feed on; their days are numbered. Although their maggots and pupae may find places to weather the winter, adult bluebottles will perish in the next frost. For now, their messaging is about finding one another on the warmest ledges. Three or four join the first on the creamy stone facing the sky and the wide view to the south-east.

Those huge eyes with their hundred screens, what can they see? Not the long shadows from isolated trees on the hillside opposite, reaching across fields. Not traces of circular earthworks and ghostly outlines of medieval ridge and furrow cultivation under a thin skin of green. Not the bulldozer-scraped quarry below and the long pool against the cliff. Not the parties of passing fieldfares, the finches in ash trees above, the anxious blackbird sounding the alarm. They see a world picked out by a complex geography of molecules, each of which is loaded with meaning for them, and the thermal topography of warm rock faces, which is giving this kinship of bluebottles a final holiday. This is not unlike our winter festivities: we seek the glow of community and celebrate what we take from the land without seeing too far ahead. Our own myopia misses what happens beyond the blurred edges where meaning loses focus. Warmed by the stone but open to the breeze, the bluebottle spins into the air and buzzes through an unpredictable pathway to another point on the outcrop, a shining blue reveller of light.

<em>Twitter: @DrPaulEvans1</em>

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