PhilSouthern Hawker

Dragonflies in general are wonderful living fossils, adapted to exist between two worlds, to disperse and to adapt to constant change and developing landscapes. I am Standing Beside these beings by writing, taking walks, giving talks and general awareness raising

The Watcher by the Water

‘What if dragonflies shared a collective memory? They have been around for some 200 million years, 300 if you consider ‘dragonfly-like’ ancestors. What would they think of the changes we have wrought. As a group, they’ve coped with mass extinctions, thermal maxima and glaciation. It seems likely that they’ll pull through whatever we throw at them. They’ve seen so many species come and go across the British Isles, how would they feel about our chances?’

 I am there, I am gone, but I am watching you. Aeshna cyanea you call me, the southern hawker.

Always interested, I train my headlights on you, my thousands of lenses. Watching you work, watching you play, watching you change the landscape. You’ll never pick me from the air, I can fly forward, sideways, backward. A flick, a twist, half a barrel roll, and I’m gone. But I’ll be back. You’re in my territory, and I am watching you.

I am a master of the hunt, a master of the air. For most of my life I was a master of the water too. Your name for my kind, Aeshna, may come from a word for spear, and indeed I am an instrument of death, an aerial retiarius. My jaws a spear, my legs a net, the broad skies and silty ponds my coliseum. I was here when your Coliseum was a story, an idea.

I was here long before you, crossing from Africa with the retreat of the ice, breeding in the melt, growing in the pools and the ditches, and I watched you arrive.

You tamed my kingdom, hemming in the rivers, straightening them, deepening them, building a logical, controllable world from the rise and fall of the water. You killed anything you could not tame, pulling productivity for yourselves from a complex system adapted to produce myriad other life.

It’s not your fault, it’s what you are. You are the destroyer, I am the watcher. I looked you in the eye as you cut the hay of your artificial riverside meadows, as you wrestled your oxen and your ploughs.

I look you in the eye now, are you repentant?

I have followed you these many millennia. The water is my salvation, as much as it is yours. So I have bred in your mill pools, your drainage channels, your dew ponds and your gardens. I have hunted, emerged and flown alongside you through all your changes.

I remember what came before. I remember the lions, I remember the aurochs, I remember the bears. I knew the land before your patchwork of agriculture, your sprawls of grey and glass. I remember the days when the night was dark, lit only by stars and moon, not your artificial glow.

The world is changed. Many would say it is unrecognisable. But I recognise it, because I have been watching. While patrolling my territory I have seen it morph as it has always morphed. But I have morphed too, my kind have been morphing for two hundred million years. We saw the dinosaurs fall, we’ve weathered the rise and fall of global temperatures unimaginable to your kind. We’ve seen forests at the poles, seen a quarter of the planet encased in ice, and we’ve endured.

So many species have not endured, and now, in this latest flux, so rapid a change, more will be lost. It is impossible to say how many. This world is built in your image, these changes are the consequence. Compared to our three hundred million, you have a mere three hundred thousand years behind you. You must be confident.

Come down to the ponds, come down to the ditches. I’ll be here, on patrol, as I always have been. Come and find me, tell me you’re confident it will be ok.

Look me in the eyes as you say it, let’s see if you believe it yourself.