Enter the dragon

Fizzing over water like a fairy aeroplane, the swooping and hovering bejewelled dragonfly is one of the insect success stories of the 21st century–and, as a rule, it won’t bite you, says Jack Watkins

- Jack Watkins

THE older we get, the more vivid past events become. A stand-out memory of mine from childhood is of wandering into the playground one sunny lunchtime to find an animated cluster of mates by the brick wall that separated the boys’ schoolyard from the gardens of the houses beyond. A dragonfly was trapped in the tight wire mesh topping the wall. The wounded creature, possibly in its final moments, was twitching faintly, but, to young eyes, its long, fat body presented an intimidating spectacle. ‘There’s nothing we can do. It could bite you if you tried to free it,’ was the general sentiment. The school bell rang and we departed to our classroom, leaving the poor creature to perish alone.

Dragonflies are generally harmless. They don’t sting, despite the reference in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary to them as ‘a stinging fly’, and, as a rule, they don’t bite either. They certainly won’t deliberately attack you. So perhaps we could have saved our winged school-yard visitor after all (although the soundest advice is that, if you see a dragonfly with damaged wings, it is probably best simply to leave it alone). This is the moment where grown ups recollecting wildlife encounters in youth round off the anecdote with an ‘of course, you’d never see a creature like that in an urban playground today’—but, in this instance, that would be wrong.