The days are sunny and mostly warm the nights are cold. It’s not hard to imagine that winter is coming to visit when you get up in the morning and see the heavy dew sparkling like frosty diamonds on the falling leaves. Where do dragonflies go in winter? What happens to them, do they magically reappear in the spring? Do you ever wonder how something that was here before the dinosaurs, still flies on this earth.
We know that the birds fly south, some stay here for the winter, shivering, and cold. But where do the insects go? Do they travel to the pond, through the golden field behind our house, past the muskrat that slides down the wet banking into the water, do they hover over the black angus cows? Do they hesitate? Looking for just one more day of sunshine, or do they go early in order not to be caught in the frost.
I used to wonder if they hid among the bull rushes, caught on a flicker of sunlight, longing for warmer days? Or did they too fly away to a warmer spot. Did they bury themselves in the mud of the pond banking?
I’ve often wondered where the dragonflies went, and what their fate would be. Now I know that they don’t make it through the winter, this is their last summer… I liked it better when I didn’t know.
But there is good news, the nymphs will live in the pond for a year or two, little wigglers that emerge in spring as dragonflies… and the circle of nature is extended a ring or two wider.
So sad as it is that the dragonflies don’t go somewhere for winter, we must take our joy from the knowledge that in the spring their babies will be the ones that alight on our hands, and flutter through the breeze. Flickering in the waning sunlight…