One late afternoon last week while walking down the driveway to lock the gate for the evening I came across a huge line of very large black ants crossing from one side of he drive to the other. Massive, uncountable numbers on the move and obviously on a mission.
Sunday night the National Geographic Channel premiered a new series called “Grand Migrations.” One segment was about Army Ants in Costa Rica and it seemed very similar to what I had witnessed a couple of days earlier. We are, after all, only a few miles from the border with Costa Rica so these were probably Army Ants as well. In the t.v. series it seemed the column of ants covered a wide area while the column here was quite orderly and only about three inches wide.
Yesterday, the day after watching the ants on the tube, as I went to deposit a bag of trash in the bin out on the car port when I turned the corner of the house the entire area was covered with migrating ants.
They came out of the grass on the east side of the house and streamed down the 55′-long rain gutter to the west side
where they made a left hand turn onto the 25’X6′ walkway along side the house
and then performed a column right onto the 12′ X 6′ covered walkway to the carport
and then spread out to cover the entire floor of the18′ X 12′ carport.
They were moving with purpose. Picture the entire concrete area in the last three photos a seething, moving carpet of large, black ants.
I didn’t run for my camera to capture this stomach-turning and frightening sight but for a can of poison instead. After my genocidal application of chemical death from above I hadn’t stopped the march but did manage to divert it to the the rain gutter that runs around the house and behind the storage room at the back of the carport. This accomplished I then got out my video camera and recorded the following:
The migration continued into the night and with morning’s light it was as if they had never been here. I have no idea where they ended up
One More Good Adventure 