In my south Louisiana childhood, dragonflies were so common they sometimes looked almost like a fog overhead, especially in the late afternoon; if you sat still for a few minutes they’d start landing on you. The most common colors were blue and green, but in the canefield behind my house there were yellowish-orange ones with stripes on the wings, and we’d occasionally see big purple ones or shiny bronze ones. At my granduncle’s farm in Ponchatoula, I once caught an absolutely enormous bright orange one. They weren’t all that hard to catch, and if one held them by the wings for a minute or two their wings would become too damp to fly, and they’d simply cling to one’s finger or hand like the one in this picture while their wings dried off, then they’d soon fly away again. I remember one day when I was probably about 11 or 12, I organized the neighborhood kids to catch as many as we could in about an hour and put them in an empty garbage can with an old sheet over it; I then theatrically whipped off the sheet and they flew out of the can like a cloud. On another occasion, a gigantic swarm of them passed overhead while we were playing tag; it took over a minute to pass, and there must have been tens of thousands of them at a minimum.
But by the Eighties I barely saw them any more, and I haven’t seen one in person in decades. I believe the reason they became rare in the New Orleans area was the spread of mosquito control; dragonflies are predators (we used to call them “mosquito hawks”), so fewer prey means fewer dragonflies. There was no mosquito control in my home town in the ’70s, but there was when I returned in 1988 from years of living in the city. And while mosquito control is a necessary evil, of all the things lost to progress, I think the loss of dragonflies is among the ones I feel most keenly. So much so, I’ve intentionally included them in my stories, in descriptions of New Orleans summers of the 1920s. Yes, all progress has a price. But I wish beauty didn’t always have to be part of that price.
