So I went outside to write in the heat, wanted to finish a chapter of The Witch Box, and when I’d had enough, I came back in to lie on the floor and cool off. I was just getting settled when Patty reported, with alarm, “What’s that on your back? Oh, it’s some awful kind of great big spider!”
“Well, are you going to just stand there looking at it? Get it off me!” I may be Mr. Nature, but I’d just as soon not have some great big spider crawl under my shirt.
“How? How do I get it off you?”
“I don’t know! Do something!”
She started to pull up my shirt. I wasn’t having that! “Oh! It’s got a long body like a grasshopper!” She was still messing about with my shirt when the big nasty spider suddenly “flew away.”
“What? A spider that can fly? Where did it go?”
“I don’t know! It just flew off!”
By and by I found the creature resting on a windowpane. Now that I could see it, I realized it was an assassin fly. I drew Patty’s attention to it. “Is this what you saw?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“There’s no problem, then. It’s an assassin fly. It’s a predator. It has no interest in human beings.”
“Does it eat bugs? Will it eat flies?”
“Flies, and anything else it can catch.”
“Well, then, it can stay here and be welcome,” Patty said.
So it’s still there on the windowpane, waiting for a tasty fly to come along.
We have cute woolly aphids right now—they look like tinker bell bugs!
Have you got a picture?
In Louisiana, we had mosquito hawks. They were flying insects that looked like giant mosquitos, and when I first saw one, I almost had a heart attack. Then someone told me to leave them alone because they ate mosquitos and this was their camouflage.
Patty has named our assassin fly “Martis.”
Too funny! 🙂
Thank you.