To a female mosquito, I look like lunch:  a big bag of nice warm blood.  The bag is annoyingly mobile, but she is also mobile and is quite good at using a mix of cues (chemical, thermal, and visual) to home in on the bag.  Then it will be time to lay eggs.  From her viewpoint, my birdbath was a good place for egg laying until I rigged a hose to drip into it.

The dripping also keeps the birdbath full and makes it more attractive to the birds, who consider it a good place for a sip of water and sometimes a bath.  From the birds’ viewpoint, it never was a good place for egg laying.  I am glad that the mosquitoes have finally come around to the birds’ opinion.

Blood for lunch does not appeal to me.  Neither do caterpillars, so I do not compete with any past or present birdbath visitors for food.  I eat something healthy (from a human viewpoint) and finish off with something obscenely healthy: a few raw carrot sticks and then a few raw snow peas.  (That lets me get away w/o brushing my teeth after lunch.)  I also view the veggies as colorful objects to be arranged in a very temporary display on the plate before they become ugly mush that is mercifully out of sight.

A few days ago, I happened to arrange my lunch veggies so as to look a little like a dragonfly, with snow peas as wings.  Hmmm.  Maybe I could pull more veggies from the fridge and make an arrangement that looks a lot like a dragonfly to me. (No real dragonfly would be fooled.) This little project reminded me that a dragonfly is the enemy of my enemy, and thus my friend.

What’s for Lunch?
|Mosquitoes in flight
|are seen as meat on the hoof
|by a dragonfly.