Small visitors

All sorts of interesting things/people drop into this house, and with a few notable exceptions (the mosquitoes are MASSIVE), they are mostly rather small. A few weeks ago, it seemed the flying beastie population had hit its maximum and I could barely turn on a light without a swarm of various sorts of moths, mossies, midges, craneflies and other assorted insects homing to it. Most of these things I live alongside quite happily, but the biting things are far from being my friends. Fortunately, this week they've been biting everyone except for me - this might be something to do with my not being around this week and instead being rather boringly at work. 

We had a rather large moth flying around the living room a few weeks back as Stray and I were contemplating the thought of a mug of cocoa and a few rather convoluted crossword clues. It was absolutely enormous with a huge, heavy-looking body. And it was very, very black. And had a rather odd form of flight. After watching it career around the room for a few moments more, it became obvious to us that this moth was in fact a bat. Between Stray, the bat and me, we squawked a bit, opened the door and cowered in corners, flinching when the bat headed our way. The bat seemed to keep its cool, though, and calmly made for the emergency exit. Phew.

I was, however, rather delighted when this obliging little creature (some sort of hawker dragonfly, I think) dropped in on me today and consented to be photographed.

Actually, it wasn't so little. It was maybe three to four inches long with a four inch wingspan, so quite large as flying beasties go. And rather spectacularly painted, no?? Well, anyway, it'd wedged itself in the dusty no-mans-land between sofa and floor-to-ceiling window, struggling valiantly to get at the vast open space outside, and nutting itself with grinding frequency against the glazing (yes, those are bits of cobweb and dust caught up in its wings...), causing it to need to rub its no doubt sore head.

The predatory Snuff/Orphelia was sitting atop the sofa just in case the stricken thing managed to gain enough height to escape the sofa hinterland and become A Valid Plaything. The beastie appeared to be well-trapped in three spatial dimensions - sofa/window on the z-axis, floor/certain-death-by-cat on the y-axis, and two window frames on the x-axis. It needed help.

Much flapping of towels, relocating of cats and shining of torches later, I eventually got the thing onto the curtain, where it posed gratefully and recovered from the percussive beating it had given itself. A few snaps later, I dragged it out of the door on the curtain and gave it a good shake, leaving it to fly off to fight another day.

I hope it identifies and learns some self-preservation lessons from its brief stay in the house of flying things.