Catching Fireflies

As a follow up to my recent blog post about fireflies, here are some photos of my kids out in the garden catching fireflies.  They loved it.  Even though they are now seeing them every single night, they are still as excited by it as they were the first time they saw them.  They want to go out into the garden every single night with a jar and collect enough to make it glow like a lantern.  They think it is completely magical.  Every.  Single.  Time.  What I am also enjoying are the bats flying overhead, swooping around and probably eating the lightning bugs but, you know, circle of life and all that.  We used to get bats in our garden in Scotland too so it is lovely to see them here in Pennsylvania.  Even though these ones might have rabies.  Less welcome are the mosquitoes that bite me constantly.  I am allergic to bug bites so I swell up into hot, throbbing, red patches of grossness every time one nibbles on me.  Definitely not magical.  However, this is all about the enchanting wonder of fireflies so here are some pictures of my sons in their jammies collecting the lightning bugs.

 

PS  A friend from back home in Scotland informs me that she has sometimes seen fireflies just a few miles from where we lived.  I lived there for over a decade and never once saw them.  Glowing little blighters.

 

 

 

 

 

Small Differences: Rabies

Today I received an email from the Township informing me that a local skunk was found to have rabies.  Yes, as if a skunk being near you wasn’t bad news enough, this particular offender was rabid.  I picked up this email on my phone while eating lunch.  Such appetising news.  But I’ve never had to really think about rabies before so this is an interesting development for me.

Great Britain, by virtue of being an island nation, is rabies free.  Well, technically it is.  Sometimes an occasional international flying bat makes its way to Britain carrying the rabies virus and I remember tales of rabid foxes hiking through the Channel Tunnel, though how true that is I don’t know.  Generally, however, in Britain we don’t have to fret about rabies.  It is something that I have been peripherally aware of because of travelling but I’ve never really, properly had to think about it.

Now that I live in America, I am going to have to get used to all sorts of new “rules” about bugs and beasties.  In 2000 I was on a road trip in the South West of the US and was scooping lizards up into my hands in the desert.  My brother-in-law thought I was nuts and dragged me to look at a book at the Ranger Station that was about identifying venomous and poisonous creatures, his point being that I was picking them up willy nilly not knowing which critters were friendly and which would have me writhing in agony, flicking through a book desperately attempting to identify the culprit  in order to determine which anti-venom serum I needed.  In the UK we have one “dangerous” critter, a snake called an adder.  That’s it.  Everything else is harmless.  That said, I did once still try to pick up an adder but it got away from me.  I don’t think adders are too aggressive though as, when I was a wee lassie, I was walking on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh and jumped into some gorse that, it transpired, was an adder’s nest.  All the snakes did was quickly slither off while I was a bit startled.

Here in the US, however, there are a bunch of things that could inflict hurt and harm on me, from tiny spiders to angry snakes to cougars and bears.  I think even I would know not to try and interact with a mountain lion or grizzly, of course.  I can be a bit daft but I’m not that stupid.  But I do, for instance, need to get a clue about which spiders are OK and which are not.  And, lest we forget, I need to remember not to go near any critter that looks a bit crazy, twitchy or is foaming at the mouth.  I need to just stop picking up wild animals.

Meeting the bugs at the Insectarium

Today we went on a family trip to the Insectarium on the outskirts of Philadelphia.  

My four boys and I love all things creepy-crawly.  Back in Scotland, we loved to go on minibeast hunts as part of our nature rambles.  Of course, in Scotland there was nothing poisonous or venomous in the bug world so we could happily scoop things up into our hands to study them.  That’s going to be a learning curve here.  Our favourite was the dor beetle, a type of dung beetle with a matt black upper carapace but a beautiful, metallic underside the colours of petrol in a puddle.  Despite the fact they were abundant so we were always likely to find them on any walk, we were always happy to encounter them.  There were also a plethora of dragonfly species where we lived and we loved to see them darting around, dashes of bright colour, in the warmer months.  As well as wild insects, for a period we also had pet cockroaches.  Madagascan Hissing Cockroaches to be precise.  Having them in a tank was a bit like having fish: they don’t cuddle on your lap and you don’t have to take them for a walk (bonus!) but studying them can be fascinating and almost meditative.  I got them used to being handled so they were more interactive.  You can’t pick up a fish and stroke it.  So my boys are very much “slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails” boys and I’m their bug lovin’ momma.  This trip was, therefore, very much our cup of tea.

My husband, on the other hand, has a bit of a love-hate relationship with spiders.  If he happens upon one unexpectedly or if one suddenly scuttles across the floor late at night, he has been known to release a piercing scream.  And he swears one wolf spider tried to attack him with its “fangs”.  But the same dread they fill him with has also led him to be fascinated by them.  He is always drawn to spider exhibits in any display of captive beasties.

The Insectarium is a funny wee place.  The Insect Museum, it turned out, is housed in the same building as an extermination business.  In fact, the two operations are run by the same people.  So in the same shop where one buys tickets to go and marvel at the wonders of insect and arachnid life, there is also someone advising how to search and destroy insects who are running amuck in houses.  Love and hate.  Diversification in a business is a good idea, of course, but that’s quite some mixed message.

 

The first floor of the Insectarium is devoted mainly to specimens of insects.  The walls are lined with butterflies in frames and there are glass cabinets filled with cases of bugs and spiders.  It reminded me of a Victorian curiosity cabinet or the dusty sections of an old museum.  One of my favourite museums is the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.  It had a remodel a few years ago but when I was little it was pretty much arranged as it had been for centuries and on one of the top floors there was a musty room filled with wooden cabinets, each covered by a leather flap which, when raised, revealed hundreds of insects, butterflies and arachnids pinned in serried rows.  The Insectarium was like a hobbyist’s version of the same.  

The boys loved seeing the glow-in-the-dark scorpions under the ultraviolet light, a hive full of live bees that was a glass panel so that they could see them buzzing around the hexagonal cells and a display set up like a kitchen with live cockroaches milling around.  They also got to vote for their favourite baby insect.  Three of them were loyal to our former pets and voted for the baby roach but the littlest Pict voted for the baby leaf insect.

 

 

The upper floor, however, was the main event: tanks upon tanks filled with live beasties.  Highlights were the Black Widow Spider, the Goliath Tarantula, the chubby scorpions and – for me at least – the variety of cockroach species.  We were also amused by a tank full of decorated shells, painted in bright colours, for the hermit crabs to choose from.  Pimp my shell.  The boys and I also got to hold various insects including a fancy Leaf Insect and a beetle that feigns death, on its back, legs up the air and everything, as a defence strategy.

 

 

We had a fun day.  Everyone enjoyed the trip: the boys and I got to indulge our love of seeing and handling insects but in a way that is safer than just shoving our hands into someone leaf mulch in the wild – at least until such time as we have learned to identify venomous bugs – and my husband was excited to see a Black Widow, which he loves.  And hates.  And for my next insect pet, I would like a Glorious Beetle.