In Sync with Nature

About this time each year, the sides of our barn begin moving in orange waves as the sun warms the panels. Little beetle armies. Our upstairs bedrooms experience infiltrations of...ladybugs. THOUSANDS of ladybugs. Some people think these bugs are cute. They're not. They bite. They stain orange. They overwinter if one is not vigilant. Even when one IS vigilant, the window sills can sport dead ladybug bodies on any given morning.

Yes -it IS ick.

Why does this phenomenon occur? I have been told that somebody at our local university, in all their wisdom, released ladybugs years ago, in order to create a predator for some other local bug/aphid/who-knows-what.

All I know now is that my household and barnhold are left experiencing this annual legacy.

I am not sure one should tamper with nature.

Look at Australia's problem with cane toads. These giant amphibians were intentionally introduced to the island (yes, Australia is an island) to curb the cane beetles which were eating, of course, cane. Sugar cane. Before 1935, Australia did not have any "toad" species of its own. Wallaby, kangaroo, platypus: yes. Toads? No. Someone brought some cane toads over from Hawaii and released the toads, to take care of the beetle population. And the toads flourished in their new environment. The cane beetle lives high up on the cane. The cane toad can't jump very high, say, about two feet. So instead of feasting on tasty cane beetles, the cane toad feeds on frogs, bird eggs, and bugs other than...cane beetles. Oh, and let me mention that the cane toad is poisonous, so any would-be predators to it are killed, as well. Other than brush fires, Australia's biggest menace to nature and animals are invasive species - and the cane toad is the biggest-known threat.

So, we could say that was a big Oops.

I'm thinking our ladybug population is a big Oops, too.

And how about that New York rat population? A few years ago (or more) someone decided to intentionally introduce possums into the rat-infested neighborhoods of New York. Wow. I might like to have been a fly on the subway wall for that one; years ago I had a Swiss neighbor who, apparently, had never seen a possum before. Late one afternoon I heard screaming from our back yard. That was odd and very unsettling. Small town Oklahoma neighborhoods do not often experience SCREAMING like I heard that day. I ran out back to see my horrified neighbor. "A RAT! A RAT!", she screamed. I looked down into the holly bushes where she was pointing, and omigoodness: "Claudia, honey-pie, that's not a rat. That's a very, very large possum".

I cannot imagine how the city folk in NYC reacted when they saw THEIR first possum.

And those possums, anyway? They didn't go after the rats as was anticipated. They went after the trash and crap in the New York streets and alleyways. Nature is a delicate balance, and if you go and throw a possum where it's not supposed to be, then it tilts the balance all over the place and not only do you have rats to contend with, but garbage-eating possums, too.

And so now all I am reading about is bedbugs. That's a double-ICK. First of all, I did not realize they are as big as they are; about 4mm x2.5 mm. That's the size of a regular tick! I thought bedbugs were little, tiny, microscopic and very nearly imaginary bugs. I have always ended our kids' bedtime goodnights with:

Goodnight!

Sleep tight!

Don't let the bedbugs

Bite,

Bite,

Bite!

But they're not tiny and not imaginary. They are real, and living well in NYC.

So...what's a predator of the bedbug? Centipede. Fire ant.

Let's not go there, you wannabe entymologists.

"The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated."

~ Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970), Saturday Review, June 8, 1963.

So divinely is the world organized that every one of us, in our place and time, is in balance with everything else.

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe