Odd.

da lawn and da cornfield

A little after 5pm one day last week I decided to go sit on the front porch swing and indulge, for a few minutes, my hobby of watching corn grow in the field across the road (actual field above).  The sky was clear, the temperature was in the low 80s, and the nightly clouds of mosquitoes had not yet arrived.

After a few minutes, I noticed that there were an unusual number of swallows swooping and zooming around about 10-15 feet above the lawn.  It took a while to dawn on me because swallows often hunt bugs in the late afternoon, and when I mow the grass they swoop around my head as I drive the tractor up and down the lawn.

But this was not the usual eight or ten birds.  There were at least sixty of them, flying randomly above the yard, passing each other so closely it seemed impossible that they wouldn’t be constantly colliding.  But they didn’t.  They just flew around and around, back and forth.  They seemed exuberant.

Then it got much weirder.  I noticed, a little below the level of the swallows, that quite a few dragonflies were doing exactly the same thing — darting around and around, back and forth.  We see dragonflies all the time, but almost always no more than two or three in the same area.  There must have been at least twenty zooming around right in front of the porch.

At this point I remembered that, as far as I know, swallows eat dragonflies.  But the swallows weren’t trying to catch them, and the dragonflies didn’t seem afraid that they would.  The birds and bugs seemed oblivious to each other’s presence.

By this time I was severely weirded out and called Kathy outside, where she quickly made a remarkable discovery:  the same thing was going on in the side yard, but on steroids.  There were literally hundreds of dragonflies zooming and wheeling over the yard, from three to fifteen feet above the ground.  I had no idea that we had even a tenth of that number of dragonflies living on our land.  And above and among the dragonflies there were yet more swallows zooming around.

At this point we began to wonder what the hell was going on.  Was this a warning of something about to happen, perhaps an earthquake?  Was it an omen of some sort?  Was Pascal’s Wager about to turn out to be a much better bet than I had thought?  It was definitely goosebump city, and it showed no sign of letting up.

Kathy then did what had not occurred to me and went inside to Google the phenomenon. It turns out that it’s not that unusual — in nature preserves, which is what I guess we’ve created by letting about half our land go wild. Here is an good narrative of the kind of behavior we saw, although I don’t entirely believe it was a feeding frenzy.  I see swallows feeding on insects all the time and these were behaving differently.  Positing a plethora of “invisible” insects (which would have to be very small — we were walking among the dragonflies at one point) may be missing the point of the exercise.  The critters seemed to be just having fun.

In any case, it went on for about half an hour, then slowly petered out, and hasn’t happened since.  But we’re glad we’ve made a place where it does happen.