Lundy: Our friend Othmar, part 1 Comments
Many years ago, so many I have no real idea how many, a bug and a neighbor combined to make entomology history at my house — well, sort of anyway — during a get-together of family and friends.
A box-elder beetle landed somewhere in the middle of the gathering — maybe at the dinner table — and someone moved to dispatch it. But before he could, my neighbor Doug Stennett — great guy, by the way; recently retired from the OSU pharmacy school — said, “Wait, don’t hurt him. That’s my friend, Othmar.”
Before then, the only Othmar that I had ever heard of was Miss Othmar, Charlie Brown’s teacher. But for some reason — and not just for me, but for everyone — the name Othmar became a permanent synonym for box-elder beetle, so much so that we now refer to them simply as othmars.
And we get a lot of chance to refer to them, especially on sunny fall and winter days, when they collect en masse on an ancient fir in our backyard and on the south-facing windows of our house. Of course, from those staging areas they often make their way into the house, which is no big deal because they are completely harmless if sometimes sort of pushy. For example, one recent morning I went to fetch a cup of coffee and saw this:
But again, no problem. Guess he just needed a pick-me-up to complete his day’s travels, and these bugs do travel, sometimes many miles. More on that tomorrow …
