Miscellaneous Wanderings and Maunderings
Miscellaneous Wanderings and Maunderings
Way back in March of 2001, my wife and I were out hiking in Phoenix’s South Mountains. I had just gotten my first digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix, and was eager to take some photos. I was trying to take…
These photos are from a trip I took in June of 2005, to Pinetop, Arizona. I was looking for ants, and I had put out some cookie crumbs as bait. This particular location had both Camponotus and Pheidole ants at…
About a month after I watched the Forelius pruinosus eating the Sagauro Cactus fruit, I was watching tiny ants going in and out of a small slit in a Prickly Pear Cactus fruit.
One day in late June, 2003, I was walking through Saguaro National Park East. The Sagauro Cactus fruits were starting to ripen, and a few had fallen to the ground. Looking at one of the fruits, I saw what looked…
In August of 2004, in Tucson, Arizona, our backyard Devil’s Claw plant was in bloom. When I was looking at the plant’s pretty purple/violet blossoms, I saw that there were Dorymyrmex bicolor ants the plant’s leaves and stems. Seeing Dorymyrmex…
In June of 2004, I was poking around in our backyard garden in Tucson, Arizona. The squash plants were flowering, and I was having fun looking at their enormous flowers. I noticed that that some of the flowers were being…
After the presumptive joys of the Desert Leafcutter Ant mating flight, life gets hard for the newly mated Leafcutter Ants.
In early September of 2004, I was in my front yard in Tucson, Arizona when I noticed a swarm of large flying insects. They were centered just above a real-estate sign that was out in the middle of the road.…
It’s funny. For the first four or five years that I lived in Arizona, I had no clue that we had Leafcutter Ants. Then, after seeing the first nest, it was as if they were everywhere. Come to find out,…
One July day in 2004, I was out in the desert watching ants. Everywhere I looked, I saw something neat. We’d had monsoon rains a day or so previously and it had brought the desert to life. I was sitting…