Month of the Scarab
One of the many splendors of monsoon season is that bugs appear. Poof! Like they were freeze-dried, and the rains reconstitute them. Even just a hint of the summer rains brings them out.
Some of the bugs are icky. I hate, hate, hate the June Bugs; they are a kind of slimy tan color, they sit on screens and buzz, and they give me the heebie-jeebies. I don’t know why I have such a visceral reaction, but they give me the creeps almost as much as earwigs do.
Some of the bugs are pretty ordinary, but interesting–we get hummingbird moths at this time of year as well, big, fat suckers that hover over flowers with humming wings, just like the hummingbirds (hence the name…what a surprise).
Then there are the scarab beetles.
Oh, I love the scarabs.
The ones we have up here are brown with tan and light green stripes, about an inch-and-a-half long, officially called ten-lined june beetles. The most interesting thing about them, in my opinion, is their lovely antennae, which are normally club-like brown things at the end of a stalk, but when they’re interested in something, the clubs spread out into a delicate fan.
They’re quite pretty and intriguing, but actually kind of dumb.
So the rains start up–even the slightest hint of rains–and the scarabs appear. We can go out on the back deck by the door, and scoop up a scarab, admire it, and make it fan out its antennae. They have tenacious little feet, so once you’ve got one on your hand, trying to shake it off is somewhat difficult…you have to shake hard enough to make it angry, at which point, it will hiss in irritation.
When I left Chicago, I soon found that the “night hawks” which were the sound of summer to me were nowhere to be found in the southwest. I suspect that I will be saying farewell to my favorite scarabs, to be exchanged for (ugh) mosquitoes and black flies. Hopefully, though, there will be other interesting small critters to discover in Alaska; I have read already that my favorite hummingbirds, the rufous hummers, actually do get as far north as Anchorage sometimes. So we’ll try for the rufous hummers and see what kind of beautiful beetles we can find up there.
(Figlet–Yes, the rains do make our plants spring into bloom, just like the bugs–but I fear that our rains so far haven’t been enough to make things bloom. If it does before we move, I’ll post some pics.)
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