Ahjumawi

June 13, 2010   I’m sitting, stunned by the enoughness, in Ahjumawi. A steady breeze keeps mosquitoes at bay. Within the shade of juniper and pine I look south across Big Lake and the Fall River Valley to the snowy peaks of Lassen and the Thousand Lakes Wilderness. An osprey calls in the distance behind me. I am the only human here (the only way here is paddling) but white pelicans, Forster’s terns, osprey and a bald eagle patrol the lake and the forest is full of flitting wings and fluting songs.

Part of the stunnedness is at how far away I’ve let me work myself away from this simple, “it’s right here” grace. A flicker is calling. A clucking covey of quail is passing by somewhere near. This Cairns is more than a month overdue. Swallows overhead. Mourning dove lamenting on the wind. Robins chirping. We’ve hired a new teacher. Adding a classroom. Staff coming together more centered around our growing vision of what a science and nature school can be. But that’s no excuse for loosing touch with this sense of enoughness.

Next week I’m going to be in Japan . I look west toward the late afternoon sun and the forest air gleams with backlit insects and spider gossamer. Birds everywhere. Gossamer is not drifting but streaming downwind from branches they snagged upon.

June 14   Yesterday evening I kayaked out onto the lake about a half hour before sunset until about an hour after. I assumed there might be some sort of “hatch” and there was (small, white-winged mayflies). What I did not realize was that I would serve as a shortcut substitute for land. They began landing on me which seemed rather cute but fifteen minutes later when there were 5-10 on each lens of my glasses and I couldn’t take a picture without blowing the mayflies off my camera first…

I didn’t anticipate this because I had learned the classic insect generalization that if it has wings, then it is an adult. I assumed the mayfly life cycle was like the dragonfly’s: crawl out of the water up onto some vegetation, split the exoskeleton, pull the new body free, pump up the new wings, let them dry, and fly away leaving the exuvia behind. So I assumed that flying mayflies were the adults off to mate and lay eggs. No landing required. But here they were flying to my kayak and landing all over me. So I started watching them more closely.

I watched hundreds of mayflies pulling themselves out of their old “skins” like oxen straining against a plow. Eventually they got to the stage in the picture above. Then they stopped. Waited a few seconds. Then they attempted to flex their abdomen upward but the cerci (the three “tails”) remained with the old exoskeleton. Then they flexed their abdomens again and the cerci pulled out – appearing to be stretched because the cerci were two to three times longer than the exoskeleton’s cerci (as you can see in the picture). The cerci curved upwards. Again the mayfly waited a few seconds. Then it did a dance. The body rocked back and forth as if both the wings and the long cerci were catching the breeze and the mayfly was trying to balance the breeze’s force equally over its body. As it did so, the legs were doing a little jig in which legs progressively let go until finally… the mayfly lifted off and disappeared, lifted more by the breeze than its wings it seemed.

Back home two days later I looked up mayflies and learned that the books confirmed what a thousand tiny legs had drummed into me: that mayflies are the only group of insects that have a winged stage before the adult stage. That stage is what fisherman call the dun and entomologists call the subimago.