On Bug Life and Death

Cleaning the shop windows today, I whisked some dozen or so dead bugs into the dustbin, along with wing bits, antennae, legs, and miscellaneous bug dust: Asian lady beetles, flies, spiders, Box Elder bugs.

Before tumping the leavings into the trash basket, I took a few photographs, thinking about their dying and death, inside, among trinkets.  They will end up in some landfill, I suppose, where it's unlikely they will feed another life directly.  But they will move into something somehow as food.

I hope.

Reading Bernd Heinrich's The Animal Way of Dying comforts me without repulsion, despite (or perhaps because of) its specificity.  Sexton beetles lying on their backs, walking on the dead animal they move and then bury; the astonishing lifespan of some larger birds of up to 50 years (just think about that if you can); the destruction or near destruction of entire species millions strong by the bipedal johnny-come-lately; the hordes of scavenging vultures arriving so shortly after death and from as much as one hundred miles; . . . so many fascinating observations and mysteries.

This past summer, when I shared a kinship of some kind with a dead raccoon at Lake Cheston, paying a visit to the carcass each day, photographing the botflies, larvae, maggots, sexton beetles, the single vulture, I did not anticipate discovering this book.  Through Heinrich's narrative and the memory of the beautiful coon and the few small pure white bones still lying there in matted grass, I celebrate the great ongoing process of which I am part.