Today I'm going to tell you where the dragonfly wings featured in Levitation Spell necklaces come from. This is a special episode among all my gatherings.
On the Nature Spells home page, I specify that all my harvests are made with respect for biodiversity. Of course this means that I do not run in the fields and along the riversides armed with a net to hunt butterflies and dragonflies. You may have come across a butterfly wing or a dead insect in the middle of a path. We are particularly careful with my husband and my daughter and I always have a small box with me to bring them back without risking damaging them. I like the idea of being able to give them a second life in a necklace, a frame or a glass dome for example.
When it's allowed, I encourage you to step out of the trail (see my article "Forests: why they often remain unexplored") and I can assure you that you will be able to make amazing encounters: this is how I regularly find animal skulls, pretty feathers or dead insects. This week, I wanted to take the logic a step further and went on purpose to a flowery field in the hope of finding a few dead butterflies. I left with beautiful photos of butterflies foraging but came back empty-handed. While going to lunch on a riverside, I explored the surroundings and came across a whole dragonfly, dead on a sandbank; it must have gotten bogged down a short time ago. But that still doesn't explain how I was able to place 3 pairs of wings in the Levitation Spell necklaces and that I'll be able to offer a few more in the future (although not dozens either).
One day with my companion, we were in Périgord (France) for our vacation and we took a short walk that leads to a pretty stream and a waterfall. Suddenly he told me he had found a dragonfly wing. I picked it up and put it in my box and we kept walking forward to take some pretty pictures of the waterfall. Then he saw a second, then a third...
We finally began to rake the banks and rocks with our gaze and found nearly twenty wings, most of them brown or black with blue-green reflections and 3 were much larger and transparent. So of course every dragonfly has 4 wings but we usually find at most on 1 or 2 wings, so what had happened?
Try and count the dragonfly wings on that picture...
Our guess is that they were the remains of a birds' feast. They eat the body, but abandon the wings. They must have landed on the banks and rocks among the bed of the river to devour their catch and we must have arrived shortly after.
Apart from those of the necklaces, all the photos in this article are from this stroll that dates back to 2016, which in my opinion is not ready to happen again and that I am certainly not ready to forget!
