Saturday, January 31, 2009

And the ants go marching down to the ground to get out of the rain

- children's song

My bathroom at the guesthouse has ants living in the wall. I'm trying to not worry about it because they don't seem interested in much beyond the shower, and they're not the biting red kind that Andy and Chris washed out of theirs. Also, I sometimes like to watch their antics.

Like this morning when I got up to shower I found a cluster of little brown ants by the window, and when I went in for a closer look, found them working to carry a large red carpenter ant they had captured and killed outside the window, around the sill to the opposite corner of the shower and up the wall to a hole that is the entrance to their wall abode.

They also had dismembered a black carpenter ant and were busy taking the pieces of this ant into another hole in the grout of the shower. I watched them carry the legs and abdomen through the hole, but then the little brown guys got confused when the head didn't fit. They kept trying to push it in at various angles adding more pushers, switching to pulling, but it just did not fit. After a few minutes the ants took it to a different hole in the tile.

I waited until both carpenter ants were safely in the wall before taking my shower.

But seriously, the ants seem to have a very highly structured and organized society. They know what they'er doing and no one and nothing can distract them from that, even when the shower walls get steamy and slippery, they're still traipsing along, window to sill to wall to hole and back again.

On our walk to visit an NGO this morning we were adopted by the most adorable street dog I have seen yet. It walked with us the whole 20 minutes there, waited for us outside and then walked the 20 minutes back with us. I wish we could have kept it and brought it back to Coe. Patricia thinks it may have been abandoned by an American and recognized us as being similar to its former owner. Poor baby.

1 comment:

jenna said...

Street dogs are such a crazy phenomenon. In Turkey and Greece they're a huge problem as they often become violent and aggressive toward humans, but there's something so reassuring about being "adopted" by one and having it follow you, wait for you.