Fairies in the Garden

I'm not remotely interested in gardening, but I spend a fair amount of time leaning on the sink and gazing out of the kitchen window, coffee cup in hand, just watching the goings-on in the back garden. I note how the neighbour's cat seems to prefer our chaotic mini-jungle to their own neatly-trimmed garden, what routes he takes, where he pauses to check out the overnight olfactory news, and where he raises his tail to update his own daily bulletin. I observe the birds that barrel in for a frantic forage through the shrubs – great, blue, and long-tailed tits, dunnocks, wrens, blackcaps, and various indistinguishable warblers (the classic twitchers' "small brown jobbies") – and those that exercise some kind of complex overlapping feudal lordships over our patch: pairs of robins and blackbirds, and an annoying thrush given to relentless shouty vocalisations ("song" is far too generous). I notice that the resurgent house sparrows seem finally to have discovered that the houses in our street have a back as well as a front garden, and may be launching a hostile takeover bid.

As a sometime moth-collector, what I notice in particular is the insect life: the bees, wasps, butterflies, dragonflies, damsel-flies, hoverflies, and bog-standard fly-type flies that browse the plants, or flash through the sunbeams like tracer bullets. This year, however, something new, or at least never before noticed, appeared. A couple of weeks ago, whenever the sun came out, I noticed a strange dance going on above the shed roof, where some honeysuckle has established itself. About twenty or thirty blackish insects with extraordinarily long, white-tipped appendages were endlessly rising and falling in the sunlight. There was something simultaneously mesmerising and repellent about them. Their constant motion made them hard to make out, even with binoculars, and I couldn't get close enough for a proper look. My presumption was that they were some kind of ichneumon wasp, with their long antennae or perhaps twin tails, participating in an elaborate breeding ritual.

Now, much as I approve of regular wasps, the ichneumons are, frankly, revolting. They are parasitic, generally laying their eggs in or on the larvae of other insects, which are then gradually eaten alive. The common, upstanding wasps never speak of these shameful relatives. So, the experience of watching them in the preparatory stages of their disgusting life-cycle was ambivalent, to say the least, like watching some lively zombie-vampire disco. To be honest, my first instinct was Conradian: "exterminate all the brutes!"

I then tried to identify the exact species, but without much luck. There are thousands of the things, after all, and the Observer's Book of Repellent Insects only covers a few. Even the Web came up empty. Until, that is, I remembered the Successful Super-Searcher's Secret Strategy™, which is: play dumb. That is, don't presume you know what you think you know when actually you don't know what you're looking for. So I forgot about "ichneumon" and looked for ... well, some search terms so cunningly-but-idiotically simple that I won't embarrass myself (or compromise my Super-Searcher status) by revealing them. As a result of which I discovered these creatures are actually day-flying moths: fairy longhorn moths to be exact (probably the Green Fairy Longhorn, Adela reaumurella).

Knowing which, of course, their incessant dancing instantly lost most of its sinister edge; a classic illustration of Hamlet's startlingly po-mo maxim, that "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so". Although I find there is still something a bit creepy about their appearance and un-mothlike behaviour. As with the stand-up regular wasps and the sleazy ichneumons, I suspect their respectable night-flying cousins struggle to find a good word to say about them. What's more, although their life-cycle may be blameless, they must taste revolting, even to an insect-eating bird: the various small brown jobbies that forage in the garden never touch them, despite their provocative aerial ostentation.

Sorry, this is the best I can do...

The things will keep moving...