The other night I was watching a movie with my girlfriend. Warm evening, so I had the balcony door open. Partway through, something that looked like an enormous mosquito came in out of the dark and started knocking around the lamp.
“What is that?” I asked her.
A crane fly, she said.
I had seen them before. I had always assumed they were some kind of oversized mosquito, out to sting me, suck my blood, and spread disease, and I had always killed them on that assumption.
The movie was bad enough that I picked up my phone and started reading about crane flies instead.
They are harmless gentle creatures.
They do not bite, they do not sting, they transmit no disease. The adult crane fly barely eats, and a great many never eat at all. The one circling my lamp had a few days to a couple of weeks of life in front of it, and the whole of its purpose in that time was to find another crane fly and breed. The reason it was in my living room is that the lights we leave on confuse it. It was not coming f…