Hymn of the Muna Beetle
Every night at twilight for the last month you could hear it, the droning hymn. The steady hum of a beehive and the crackle of electricity all rolled into one deep thrum. It sizzled from every tree and buzzed from the moment the sun began to think about laying down for the night, until he covered his shining head in a mantle of deep black. I hadn’t heard it before, or at least I didn’t remember it, and it puzzled me until I started to pay attention. It wasn’t a beehive or an electrical current. Instead, it was the steady, rhythmic thrum of the hard-sided, armored wings of a beetle called the muna beetle*. It’s a brown beetle about the length of your thumb, chubby and winged, and apparently tasty. And, as I asked my friends about it, they really only come around during this time of year. It made me think, this hymn of the muna beetle, about rhythms and seasons. A friend and I were talking the other day about how, when we first arrived here, we tried to make sense of the seasons in thi