2005mar23. While I’ve been working on the goose coop the last week it’s slowly being marauded by hundreds of tiny bugs. Less than one millimeter in length, red legs. Sometimes the smaller ones (babies?) are all red. I’d seen them in the midwest during my childhood, forgot about them. Now they’re everywhere on the coop. They don’t seem to have a game plan – they’re not following scents, just sort of wandering around. I don’t know where they get their power from, maybe they’re taking microscopic bites out of the wood and that’s why they’re in love with the thing. Today there was a 3/4” inchworm crawling on the inside of the coop, so I took it and put it on the side of a tree, couldn’t tell if it was pleased or angry. I went back to sit down in the doorway and there was a smaller inchworm – about half the size of the first one – making its way across the vast expanse of dirt toward the house. This one didn’t have the typical inchworm movement, probably because it was too small – instead small ripples would constantly go across its entire body from the back to the front, so it looked like it was constantly puking while moving forward.
Before I could even think about the pastabilities of MICROBUG V. INCHWORM, the battle was being set up right before my eyes. An inchworm was crawling along the top side of a long desiccated weed sort of bent into a curved bridge shape. And coming up the other side ... uh oh ... microbug.
“Well, this is easy. The inchworm eats the bug.”
So they got closer, and closer ... and then there was this pause in the action, quite possibly while they were sizing each other up ... and the inchworm then flies off the weed and starts spastically flailing in the dirt for a good five seconds. I’ve never seen so much energy in such a small package. It looked like it was on a skillet, being skilleted. The microbug continued on its way. It was like a bad martial arts movie.