These notes are full of little dramas, odd things about nature that I just don’t understand.
The latest involve different species of ants here in the Piedmont whose territories overlap. From what I can tell, they don’t compete for food and simply ignore each other. But I know so little about ants that I don’t know where to start.
I’ll savor the questions while looking for information.
Here’s Aldo Leopold, author of A Sand County Almanac, on the puzzles that a naturalist encounters:
It is fortunate, perhaps, that no matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas in the woods and meadows, one can never learn all of the salient facts about any of them.
He was writing about the sky dance of the woodcock, an elaborate set of courting behaviors involving dancing on bare ground, flying loops and peenting. Leopold, a scientist as well as a writer, said the show started, at daybreak and dusk, when the light was at 0.05 foot candles.
That requirement was so precise that that the daily show at Leopold’s farm started in April and occurred one minute later each evening as the days lengthened.
Like Leopold, I can’t fathom why a bird would have such an accurate light meter in its genes. Also like Leopold, I savor the question.
• Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac; New York: Ballentine Books, 1982, p. 35.
If you’ve never heard the peenting of a woodcock, here’s a recording:
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