Abbeydale, Sheffield: As it nears the end of its extraordinary life cycle, time is running out for this delicate, short-lived creature to find a mate
Where nature is concerned, expect the unexpected. One day I was listening for cuckoos on the moors above my home, the next I was having surgery on a part of my body I didn’t know existed. After a week in hospital, I was returned to my garden, quietly grateful and as weak as an infant, to lie on the grass in a blissful daze and watch insects busying themselves among the flowers. I had never properly stopped to notice how many and what kinds our little patch supports: bumblebees, among them common carders, miner bees, butterflies, solitary wasps, ants marching over my legs, beetles muscling through the wild strawberries.
One small drama in particular held my attention: a single male mayfly, pulsing up into the air and drifting back down. As it floated towards my feet, the mayfly’s elongated front legs, used for grasping the female during mating, and its even longer tail appendages, called cerci, bent into an arc – an improbable contraption for flight. Yet when it pushed itself back into the air, it did so almost without effort on slender, transparent wings.
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