Migration

It is the dry season. It is the most desperate time of the dry season when the water is nearly gone but the rains aren’t close enough to beginning to be sure of survival. The cycle of the seasons is what causes the massive migration of animals that tourists pay thousands of dollars to observe. Elephants, giraffes, antelope, and millions of other animals make for stunning visuals and great pictures. What is forgotten is that ALL things go in search of water and some of those migrations are not pretty but disgusting.

We battled an invasion of ants in the past weeks. Big ants, medium ants, little ants, just ants, ants, ants. They were everywhere – the kitchen, the hallway, the bathroom, just everywhere. The tiny sugar ants are a way of life here. They are always in search of food, especially sweet foods, and you learn to take precautions against them – store things in rubber-ring sealed glass jars (the ants chew through paper and plastic) or in the freezer and clean-as-you-go while cooking – that keep invasions to a minimum. The other ants do not usually make appearances indoors. The appearance of all types of ants in mind-boggling but orderly numbers was unnerving. We tried spraying them (nearly asphyxiating ourselves in the process), cleaning the entire house with bleach and mopping the floors with PineSol almost hourly. Nothing worked; in fact, the invasion seemed to become worse. Then it occurred to me that we weren’t being invaded but were in the midst of a migration. Our frantic cleaning was increasing the amount of water available to these creatures and they were communicating this as fast as they could to others. Because we cook more than most in our building (we entertain a great deal), we had the most water flowing and so became the destination of choice for all those ants in search of life-sustaining water. My guy decided to up the stakes and put out ant traps that allow the ants to enter, pick up some poisoned food and return to their nest. This kills them at their source and ends the invasion. He had the (truly) brilliant idea of wall mounting the traps to keep the ants off the floors and counters. We watched in fascinated horror as the invasion mounted over the next three days. The line of ants circled the upper part of our walls as they marched in perfect lines in and out of the traps and back to their nests as fast as they could. As one young visitor noted “It’s like the Indy-500!” Not all the ants made it back or they died as they returned for more, we aren’t sure. Ant corpses of all sizes littered the floors and counters requiring several full-scale move-and-empty cleanings of the kitchen and bathrooms. It seems to have worked, as the ants have not returned, maybe having learned this is not the ‘place of good water’ they thought it was. This experience made me rethink migration. Somewhere in my heart I had romanticized the massive search for water. The truth is that it is a desperate search for survival and not all survive. I never thought that I would play a part – a deadly part at that – of a migration.