Mating Halloween Pennants, Home

Using the proverbial "birds and the bees" to introduce the world of sex to your kids has its perils. There's the fact that birds engage in extra-pair copulations with alarming frequency—so much for fidelity and monogamy—and bees mostly make do entirely without males, save for the briefest necessity of grabbing some gametes perhaps once a year. Such sexual strategies would be hard enough to explain, but then things get really strange in the animal kingdom. I'm truly blessed that I didn't have my granddaughter Stasia with me this afternoon when I forced myself to slog through the heat and humidity and walk to the millpond for an assessment trip. The stream water is at the lowest of ebbs, but the pond remains full, so the dragonflies are busy flying, hunting, and courting. When a male succeeds in convincing a female to join him in temporary matrimony... OK, a genuine quickie... they adopt a copulatory position that, even in the Kama Sutra, would carry a warning label: Don't Try This at Home. If you have a sharp-eyed and inquisitive youngster watching the Halloween Pennant show with you, don't be surprised to be asked if you've ever done something similar. You were warned.