It was a real pleasure to look into the shallows of a Traver Creek pond yesterday and find what I’ve been looking for: bluegill spawning beds. Due to our present lack of dog and abundance of construction, I haven’t been by that pond as much as usual, and must have missed an earlier round or two of this industrious fish engineering.
Males build the beds, which look like little craters, to attract females, and it must be a winning strategy, as there are lots of bluegills in the world. Usually, there are so many beds that the shallows take on the appearance of a lunar landscape. This time around, there are fewer. But the drama is as intense as always.
Males guard their nests. Zealously. Should a male intruder attempt to enter the nest, said intruder will be smartly repelled. Presumably a female is graciously welcomed, and presumably bluegills have no trouble identifying each other instantly as male or female.
While you stand on the bank of the pond, looking down at all the activity, you notice that further away in the murky deeper water, a fish phalanx is forming. A long row of fish is readying for an assault. Some signal occurs, and all the intruders rush the nests.
Judging by the host males’ responses, all the incomers are males. The host males chase them away. And while they’re at it, some host males take the opportunity afforded by the chaos to make forays of their own into their neighbors’ nests. They get chased away, too, but that’s okay because, to make a raid on a neighbor, they’ve had to abandon their own prime real estate. Which the neighbor is now invading. It takes a lot of energy to be a bluegill dad.
While the drama was unfolding, a new mom stopped her carriage-pushing walk to see what was happening. She said she’d been curious about the craters, so I gave her and her four-month-old son Bluegill Basics. They were enthralled. I could tell because she said so, on her own behalf, and little Jimmy was ecstatic. He kicked his legs and waved his arms and blessed us with joyful smiles. Some people get all excited about bluegills. Some get all excited about babies.
A cohort of another kind made a mass approach to the pool while I was walking up Georgetown this morning: neighborhood kids bicycling up in their summer uniforms of swimsuits and flip-flops, with towels over their shoulders and helmets on their heads. A large group of them, with a few parents in tow, crossed the street, parked bikes, and stood waiting for the pool to open and practice to start. Parents, kids, and pool staff had about them that midsummer glow as they moved together, making memories.
Sunshine and dew made it easy to see the hundreds of silky, horizontal webs in the grass this morning. Grass spiders make them in their ongoing, no-cost, ecologically sound campaign to catch and eat insects that can be garden pests. They anchor the webs on the grass, and each web includes a funnel where the grass spider stays while it waits for business.
When the spider feels the modest vibrations of prey, it rushes up the funnel to subdue it and eat it up. Grass spiders are startlingly fast, and their webs aren’t sticky, so they can run right across them without getting stuck. If, on the other hand, the spider feels the major vibrations of, say, a bird or other predator, it exits the web entirely, through the bottom of the funnel, and hides in the thicker grass or a crack in the ground under the web. Grass spiders plan ahead when choosing web sites.
It’s cicada time now, too. I love listening to their buzzing, droning, roar. It’s so powerful and alien and reminds us that we are not alone on this planet. Others live all around us. On a visit to my sister in southern Ohio, I heard a pronounced buzzing that I couldn’t identify.
“What’s that sound?” I asked Marilyn and her husband.
They looked at me as if I were dim and answered, “Cicadas.”
“Really?” I persisted. “Your cicadas sing a different song than our cicadas.” This was news to them. I decided at the time that the song must vary geographically, and it does. But it also varies with cicada species.
Male cicadas sing to entice a mate. For them, the song is hopeful. For me, it has a bittersweet aspect in that it’s a marker of late summer. Perhaps I need to rethink the wonderful song as marking the height of summer.
24 July 2026