If we could see with X-ray eyes into the porous, spongy mole-riddled soil of our yard, we’d count hundreds of June Beetles in various stages of their three-year life cycle.
A single female June bug (we’ll call her Judy) can lay 200 eggs in the soil in spring. These fertile Scarab eggs soon hatch into voracious larvae that eat the roots of grasses, grow in size, then dig down deep for their first winter.
Year two, the larvae move upward in the loose soil toward the surface as it warms, eating the tiny rootlets of lawn grasses, ornamentals, and garden plants, causing yellowing or death if the roly-poly grubs are sufficiently hungry and numerous. More damaging than direct impact of the beetle larvae is the tunneling of the moles that detect them and devour them, causing a trail of carrot death, their roots as collateral damage to insectivorous appetites.
For the emerging adults: happy third birthday.
So now Judy has survived the cold, the moles and few other things that threatened her as a fat, juicy grub, during her final months nearing the surface as the soil warms in the spring.
Many of Judy’s kind, I am happy to say, disappeared from the near-surface, into the gaping maws of young blue birds or their parents in the cool spring, before insects took wing. It did my heart good to watch that grub-thwacking until subdued, time and time again. The meal prep happened often on the porch rail just outside my office window.
What Bluebirds Have For Breakfast (post from 30 May this year.)
For giggles, one warm afternoon this week I sat in the grass among the newly emerged adult June Beetles as they rose up into the universe of air and light, sound and smell. And I confess: I wondered what it might be like to have been alive and with a degree of awareness—in the dark, dank underground one minute, and a creature of the summer air, the next. I watched one beetle (our Judy the JuneBug) at just that moment, propelled by instinct out of the subterranean and into the atmospheric world.
Brief Video of Judy’s First Flight
Judy JuneBug is Airborne! And suddenly popular!
Must not this transition be bewildering if you are a June Beetle? Does Judy come equipped with anything but hard-wiring to prepare her for what this lifestyle change will be like? In that single instant in time, her compound eyes see light for the first time. She feels the sun’s warmth on her shimmering jewel-green wing covers and body armor.
A sudden impulse from her sesame-seed-sized brain sends her launching inexplicably and clumsily into the air. She had no idea she was built for this most imprecise but sufficiently effective mode of locomotion. Look! I’m flying! But why?
After a few crash landings, she gets the hang of it. While basking in the sun and wind on the nearby Chinese Plume Grass, her wings firm up (hanging out there with a few dozen other neophytes). A few final synapses connect. Flight check complete!
It might be that she hears the buzz of dozens of other new emergents and recognizes them as “her kind”. Maybe not. With her clubbed antennae, she senses pheromones in the air—her own—a perfume that will, at any moment, bring confused new males knocking on her doo.
The males are driven by something less than knowledge to seek out these fragrant ladies but not at first sure what to do about finding them—much less why they must meet, and do it soon.
And in the end…
Their biological imperative fulfilled, her suitors soon die, and Judy too, but only after she leaves her 200 eggs in my garden soil. These thousands of eggs in our yard and garden, from many dozens of gravid females, will supply the mole food economy, culminating in a final extended feast of the meaty grubs that the bluebirds don’t get first. And life goes on.
QUESTION:
Imagine that we could enter the sensory world of a praying mantis; an octopus; a caterpillar.
We would recognize the parts of their experience that include light, sound, vibration, taste and smell, but in the unique ways they experience them. We detect those same energies in kind but not in quality.
But then there would be the beyond-human perceptive ranges they know and use that we cannot, and senses and sensors we have no names for. Their world is alien to us, but just another day to Judy and all the other-than-human beings in the soil or water around us every day in our ordinary lives.
Debriefing from that our embedded moment in that alien world, could we find words to describe the “lower-organismic reality” to ourselves or others?
What was it like, we’d want to know. But words only work in the human landscape, with those who share our eyes and ears and skin, limited as they are to what humans can know and call real.
Still: Don’t you wonder?
Oh, how fortunate to be a June bug,
With wings so strong and colors so bright,
To dance in the moonlight, a joyful hug,
And bask in the warmth of summer's light.
Yet, how much more blessed we are,
To be free of the Japanese beetle's fate,
To avoid the gardener's wrath, so far,
And not be deemed a pest, so innate.
For they, too, are insects of the summer,
But their legacy is one of destruction,
Their feeding habits, so greedy and glummer,
Their presence, a gardener's frustration.
So let us count our blessings, we June bugs,
For the gift of life, so free and so grand,
And not take for granted, our humble hugs,
As we journey through summer's wonderland.
For in the end, it matters not the name,
But the joy of living, in all its glory,
And the fortune we have, to play life's game,
A part of nature's endless story.
Oh, the joy of having the perception of a June bug,
To see the world through its eyes, oh what a thrill!
The colors of the sky, the blades of grass, so snug,
The beauty of nature, oh how it can instill
A sense of wonder and awe, as we fly and roam,
The world below us, so vast and so grand,
The wind in our wings, the freedom to roam,
The joy of living, so grand and so unplanned.
The buzzing of bees, the chirping of birds,
The rustling of leaves, the scent of the earth,
All these and more, our senses are stirred,
As we revel in the joy of our June bug birth.
So let us cherish this gift, this wondrous perception,
And embrace the world with all its beauty and grace,
For in the eyes of a June bug, we find perfection,
And a reminder of life's endless embrace.