DominantSpeciesOnline.com
Title
DominantSpeciesOnline.com - The Dominant Species Series - by David Coy
Description
As a kid I spent days and days wandering in and around the fields and woods and marshes and ponds and lakes of my native Michigan. I'd search for hours in every corner of those ecosystems, rolling logs or lifing planks or rocks looking for anything that scurried or squirmed. At any water's edge, be it marsh, stream, pond or ditch, I'd stop, pull up a long strand of grass, mince at the soft end with my buck teeth and look for movement. I can close my eyes now and see the colors and forms at my feet, and smell the scent of rich earth and fertile water. Those memories are indelible.
I can describe for you precisely how a dragonfly flies, a tadpole swims, a toad jumps, a wasp rolls mud balls, a water strider strides, how a frog breaks the still surface; or how a crayfish, illuminated by the weak beam of a cheap flashlight, crawls across smooth mud on a moonless night. I’ve seen hundreds of lightning bugs dot the fields with silent flashes of pale light, watched field mice dash down smooth tunnels of grass, and seen shiny black and yellow garter snakes eat them whole. I’ve seen mud puppies silently glide along the pond bottom and I’ve plucked the crisp and empty husks of dragonfly larva off the stems of reeds growing along the muddy shores of ponds on days so hot the air felt like steam.
I’ve been bitten by tens of thousands of mosquitoes. I’ve mashed their blood-fat bodies against my arms and ankles by the thousands. I’ve inhaled insects while running across fields and yacked until I cried. I’ve itched from a million chigger bites, the red bumps of the little bastards buried in my skin turning my calves and skinny waist into mottled patterns of red and white. I’ve caught a million pan fish on hooks and imprisoned in jars and boxes, hundreds of frogs, mice, snakes and insects.
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English
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- Alexa: DominantSpeciesOnline.com
