"Wildlife" and other sundries

Yesterday was the end of rainy season! Officially! Apparently! I am not sure how one calculates such things, but the knowledge, at least, contributes to a lifting of spirits. Perhaps it's just the placebo effect, but I swear the air is clearer and less swampy than it was just a few days ago.

Yesterday was also the day that our school's staff and teachers went on what is apparently an annual outing - this year, we drove out of the city to a small day-park, where you can do an "athletic course" through the mountainous, subtropical terrain, have a barbecue with food provided, and pick blueberries. It was a blast, the weather was great, and I sweat buckets. I also had the opportunity to see more of the countryside up close and personal, which was a nice break from my city life.

However, getting up close and personal with the countryside also meant getting up close and personal with some of its denizens, which prompts me to write this post. Those of a squeamish nature or who don't like bugs shouldn't read any further; I'm not going to post pictures up here, but I'll be linking to them and giving descriptions, so if that's not your cup of tea, you've been warned.



I'm not saying that Japan is swarming with strange and horrifying bugs, because seriously, most of the bugs I see on a day-to-day basis are the usual flies, dragonflies (albeit black and thus more prominent), butterflies, and occasionally a honeybee or two. However, there are a few really creeptastic additions to that list, and I've come across them in the city and in the country alike, but they're isolated incidents. You don't see these every day.

We'll start with cicadas. I might not see them every day, but I sure as hell hear them: they're LOUD. Here's an example; the video quality is terrible, but it actually shows the cicada (not well, but if you don't wanna see it, just listen to the sound). Now imagine like fifteen of those bugs doing that at like seven in the morning outside your apartment. There's a reason (other than the heat) that I don't sleep with my sliding door open. Here's a picture - pertinent, because the other day while I was walking to work, I got to see one lumbering into the air, to fly up to a tree... right in front of me. The grossness factor was slightly eclipsed by the fact that it was such a silly-looking thing, trying to fly. Almost as if a clod of dirt the size of my fist had tried to give flight a go. It managed it, but boy, was it ungraceful.

On our adventure yesterday, I saw many bugs - regular-sized ants, the annoying flies that pestered us during our barbecue, gorgeous black butterflies the size of my hand, yellow butterflies that were slightly smaller, but only slightly, a couple of shiny beetles (dead), and the little spiders that made their webs in the blueberry bushes. These were all okay. These are what you should expect to see when you go out for a hike: yay nature!

And then there was the burrower wasp dragging a dead brown spider that was three times its size. That was a little too much for me to take: I can't help it but get a feeling of pure visceral horror when I see a spider that is too big. By "too big" I mean bigger than my thumbnail: this thing must have been the size of my palm, from leg-to-leg. And the wasp was just going at it, dragging it along over the grass because it was too heavy to lift. I can't quite even bring myself to find pictures to show you, but I'm sure you can use your imaginations.

There are small spiders who've made webs in my stairwell: I've been watching them grow from miniscule to now about the size of my pinky fingernail. I dread that they may suddenly grow three times as large and take a penchant to dropping onto my head when I'm walking up the stairs to come home from work.

My bug problems, however, are laughably small compared to what some of my friends are dealing with. I know one teacher who has a mosquito infestation in her apartment: she has no idea how they get in, where they come from, and everything she's tried to get rid of them with has failed. Another teacher has cockroaches in her apartment, and sleeps with her light on because of it: when she comes home from work, she turns on her front hall light and waits outside her front door for the roaches to scurry away. Yes, I am quite lucky. One of my students told me how the day previous, she had done battle with a snake who was trying to get into her house to escape the rain - she'd tried to brush it away from her door with a broom handle, but it attacked the broom handle multiple times and wouldn't give up.

My friends, I have it easy. I just need to keep it that way.