Okay, I tried it. I sat in my chair, without my computer, and waited for something to happen. I was totally in the moment. Boy, did I get fidgety. As it happened, I had placed the chair within reach of a good sized oak tree, the very one that has been dropping acorns on the RV since I arrived. (In fact, sometime during my first night under the tree, an acorn hit the roof and woke me up from a sound sleep. In my confusion I got up, opened the door, and actually heard myself say, “Who’s there?”)
Anyway, while I was waiting for something to happen, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that medium-sized black ants were crawling up and down the tree. So I turned my head ever so slowly, ever so slightly to the right (thereby fooling the creature I was waiting for in the first place into thinking that I was still just part of the landscape) and I watched the ants running up and down the tree trunk.
Here’s where I lost my “presence” and began thinking, wondering why the ants were going up and down the tree. I figured that since ants don’t live in trees (do they?) there must be something up there for them to…what?…see? Then I started wishing I were an ant and could get an ant’s eye view. I picked out a particular ant, a going-up one, and watched it until my neck ached and I couldn’t see it any more, about 20 feet above me. That didn’t answer my question so I picked out a particular coming-down ant to see what it was going to do next. I was able to follow it for a couple of seconds but then it crossed paths with a going-up ant and I switched my focus to that one.
This went on for about five or ten minutes, during which time I wondered how I might “tag” my ant so I could keep better track of it. Red fingernail polish? Finally, I realized that the coming-down ants seemed to have slightly enlarged abdomens. Aha, there was something up there they were ingesting! But were they eating it to satisfy their own hunger or were they taking it back to the colony for the benefit of their fellow ants?
Well, that was the end of being still and waiting for something to happen. Now I was out of my chair, following one of the coming-down ants to see where it was going. This took considerably more effort than merely sitting in a chair and it wasn’t long before I was crawling around on the ground trying to follow one ant back to the ant hill. I still have no idea what I expected to find out by doing that. (Mother Ant: ”Where did you get that?” Baby Ant: “It followed me home, can I keep it?” Mother Ant: “Okay, but you have to feed it and take care of it. I’m not going to do it for you.”). If only I could figure out the tagging thing I could watch my ant going into the ant hill and then see if it came out later with a skinny abdomen. But what would that prove?
I ended up in the neighbor’s yard for what must have been a fairly long time because when I “came to,” I heard the lady who owns said yard telling someone, I think it was her grandchild, that the lady in the yard (meaning me) had been concentrating very hard on something for quite a while.
Sheepishly, I walked back into my own yard, crawled back into my shell, and didn’t leave for the rest of the day. I never did find the ant hill but I did re-discover one thing: ants aren’t one bit afraid of humans. Why can’t Hooded Warblers be like that?
1 comment:
I watched ants like this when I was a kid and could get away with it.
Ants have a "social" stomach that enables them to share food with the rest of the community......
BTW, there's a good chance some ants are really extraterrestials. Their size allows many of them to travel in a craft better equipped to evade radar and safely travel , they're blessed with a space suit(the exoskeleton), don't need opposable thumbs and are the ultimate team players.
They walk among us!
You read it here first.
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