| Albatross | Licorice |
| Alligator | Norman Cemetery |
| Birds in My Backyard | Raccoon |
| Cardboard Boat Race | River Rescue |
| Freezing in August | River Ridge |
| 1995 Journal | Snowstorm |
The three people that were currently riding with me at that time were Maria, a beautiful Portuguese Lady from Lisbon, Tom, a redneck from of all places, Lake Placid, New York, and Bart a LtCol Aviator in the Marine Corp from Texas.
Last night we heard reports from the weather bureau that we were going to get a monster of a snow storm coming into our area before dawn. As always I didn't really believe it as they have been wrong 95% of the time. But you know how people react to these reports. They storm the nearest grocery store for bread, bottled water, milk, salt for the driveway and all the junk food they can find. So when Hedy Lynn, Ruth's sister, called to warn us about how much snow we were supposed to get I told her that the weather folks couldn't predict their way out of a paper bag. But she stuck to her guns and said we were really going to get hit bad.
We tried to go to bed early but we didn't, I mean Ruth didn't, get much sleep. She has been constipated, so she took some stool softener which gave her gas, really bad gas. So as I was saying she didn't get much sleep. I went into a sound sleep about 7:30 pm, but got up about 11:00pm and messed with the computer for a few hours and finally got in bed about ten till four.
When the alarm rang out at 4:27am, I leaped out of bed and looked out the window, as I usually do. To my surprise, there was, what looked like, 3 to 4 inches of snow on the ground and it was coming down heavily, so bad, that I could hardly see the street in front of the house. Thank god I had backed the car into the garage the night before. By the time we left for work at 5am, I measured 5 inches on the ground. My car pool were getting second thoughts about going into work, but I reassured them and they all went anyway.
Traffic was surprisingly light that morning, I guess due to the snow. But there were still problems on I-95, due to the normal interstate traffic surprised by the storm. By the time we got to Woodbridge, the road conditions had deteriorated something awful. The sand trucks where all in a convoy doing 20 miles per hour, trying to clear the High Occupancy Vehicle(HOV) lanes. The problem was that the plows had to get the snow over the six feet high retaining wall because there isn't much of a shoulder along that stretch of highway.
I finally got to a wide spot up in the road, near Springfield, when I decided I couldn't take it anymore and whipped the Jeep over on a wide part of the shoulder and started to pass the trucks through a small gap they had opened up between them. The gap started to close on me, so I gunned it, but the jeep started to fishtail pretty violently causing Maria in the back seat to let out a gargled scream. I began to sweat uncontrollable, thinking that I really should have listened to everyone earlier and stayed home. But noooo, I had to be a hero and go to work regardless of the conditions. Damn I should have listened to them. I fishtailed through the gap just before the trucks closed ranks again. After I got by the convoy, a sigh of relief came from the back seat as everyone's white knuckled grip on the back of my seat, relaxed. It was great after that, there was nobody and I mean nobody out in front the convoy, and we were able to pick our speed up from the 20 miles per hour to almost 60. I sure am glad we have 4 Wheel Drive. We got out about a mile ahead of the convoy when we hit a pot hole or something that caused me to lose control and we started heading toward wall. I clutched the steering wheel with a death grip and suddenly I heard the alarm ring and I woke up screaming from my dream. I jumped up out of bed and looked out the window and saw only rain, not one snow flake. I glanced at the thermometer and it was 42 degrees outside. I was still shaking pretty much, but I was happy it was only a dream.
I installed a few counter balanced feeders which keep them from the seed. The explanation of a counter balanced feeder is, the thing is box like with an over hanging roof to keep the rain off. It holds about two gallons of seed and has an 8-inch wide pencil shaped perch on the front of the feeder. If something as heavy as a squirrel or a crow, gets on this perch, the perch is pushed down closing off the access to the seeds in the feeder. I can adjust the counter balance mechanism to whatever weight I wish. It is very ingenious but it cost about $50. It is sort of fun watching the squirrels hanging upside down from all different angles trying to reach the seed that they can see from perching on top of the feeder but not being able to get down to it.
Don't fret about
the squirrels though, the birds are very sloppy eaters and knock a lot
of seed to the ground allowing the squirrels and mourning doves to feed
on the ground. One night, a saw something like a hamster on the bird
feeder eating his fill. I plucked at it with a wrist rocket (sling
shot), it was so startled when the stone hit the feeder, that it fell off
and hit the ground, but immediately shoots straight up the tree.
It was the damnedest thing I had ever seen. To this day I don't know
what it was exactly.
c1997
Harry H. Leichter
I described my
squirrel problem, but not my main purpose of feeding the birds. Anyway,
the main purpose for feeding the birds originally, was to keep down the
insect population. The side effect brought on by these creatures
has been to study their society and to marvel in their beauty. With
spring, different varieties of birds have appeared. The American
Goldfinch, a bright yellow bird with a black yamakah on the front of his
head, an orange beak, black wings with a white stripe running perpendicular
through the wings and about the size of an eight-year-old child's fist.
We have seen forty at a time in and around the hanging bird feeders.
c1997
Harry H. Leichter
The Indigo Bunting
is another marvel for us. Two males have been steady customers of
our back yard nature center. They are brilliant turquoise blue in
the sunlight and black and gray when sunlight is not present. That
seems confusing, but in fact, as with may "Blue Birds" they do not have
any blue pigmentation in their bodies, but diffractions of light through
the structure of the feathers make them appear blue. They are great
to have around due to their great appeal of incredible beauty and their
great appetite for mosquitos. We have a pair of Northern Cardinals
that are 8 inches long from the tip of their beaks to the end of their
tail feathers. The male is bright red in color and the female is
brown reddish combination. The Pileated Woodpeckers, with a bright
red crop of feathers sticking straight up on his head, black stripes down
white throat starting just below its eyes. The rest of the body is
black. It doesn't feed at our bird feeding stations due to its seventeen-inch
size (as big as a Crow) but we do have four that regularly visit our third
of an acre back yard. I keep my patch of woods in the natural state,
so that there are lots of down and rotting trees to replenish the soil
and bring a feast to different species of birds. I have seen the
Pileated Woodpecker using its long beak like a crowbar, prying open a rotted
log to get at the insects inside. When they hammer on a tree, it
sounds like an air hammer. Each morning that I get to sleep in, another
words, when I see the sun rise, I am awakened by the sound of the Blue
Jay's screeching. They are a very aggressive bird that feeds on other
birds eggs in the nesting season. They are 12 inches long with a
blue (not as bright as the Indigo Bunting) back and a bluish white under
belly. Their heads are angular with a black beak, black eyes and
a black line vertically on the back of their heads with a black necklace
around their necks. There are white stripes perpendicular to the
wings and a black striped ladder affect on their tail feathers. Their
society is a tribal community. When they fly into an area they set
up sentries around the perimeter to warn them of any danger, this behavior
is also found in the Crow family. We also have assorted sparrows
some with bright red fronts and heads.
One day we had
the whole scope of the bird food chain in my back yard. At the very
top of the trees were two Cooper Hawks, eyeing the squirrels and Mourning
Doves on the ground below. There was a Downy Woodpecker on a tree,
removing insects from under the bark. A tribe of Crows flew overhead
squawking out danger to the rest of the Crows because of the presence of
the Hawks. Far overhead, I could see turkey vultures circling within
the wind currents looking for something that has been killed by a car,
I call them god's garbage men. Without them, the planet would be
a lot smellier.
c1997
Harry H. Leichter
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It seems I have a sweet tooth problem when it comes to licorice. My mother, god rest her soul, was probably the one that passed along this craving, probably through the womb. I try to resist the temptation, and most of the time I have success. Every so often though, I get into a Good-and-Plenty craze and even buy the generic pink and white candies.
One time after going on one of these kicks for about a week, I was in the pharmacy getting a medication refill, when I suddenly realized that I had one white Good-and-Plenty in my coat pocket. I picked it out of the pocket, rolling it back and forth between my finger and then out of the blue I started talking with the pharmacist. I asked if she could identify what brand of medication this white capsule was. She took it and examined it for a few minutes. She was perplexed by it, even mentioning that there wasn't a detectable seam in the middle of the capsule or any markings on it to determine the brand. She handed it back to me and I said "well I guess it couldn't be toxic" and popped it into my mouth. The pharmacist had a horrified look on her face as I contorted my facial features a little, soon after the capsule entered my mouth. I waited for about thirty seconds and then exclaimed in a slow and deliberate voice, "this tastes like licorice."
Then I said, as
a look of shock crossed the pharmacist's face, "My mistake, it's a Good-and-Plenty."
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Clore Brothers have a canoe outfitter service (this is a business that supplies rental canoes by the day or hour and also provides transportation for the canoes to a place up river so that the renter's can paddle back to their location, on the river, to return the canoes and pickup their cars). They are located on the Rappahannock River in Spotsylvania County on believe it or not "River Road." A few years ago I had met the two brothers on the Rappahannock River. They were canoeing with their wives early in March, checking out the river for the upcoming canoe season. I was in my K2 (two seater) kayak just getting back from a two-hour paddle up the Rappahannock River to where the Rapidan River converges with the Rappahannock and is called the confluence. I explained to them that my house was above their heads on a one hundred fifty-foot cliff. Continuing my conversation with them I explained certain details of the river in my immediate area to display my knowledge of the river within a five-mile stretch. Because of my knowledge of the river I got a frantic call from them the following October.
Two guys decided to try their hand on the river during a flood. The river
was fifteen feet over its banks when they decided to try the river in a
vee bowed boat with oars and no motor. Their family turned up at
Clore Brother Outfitters, the take out point for the day trip. The
wife (four months pregnant) of one of the men and two fathers were asking
the Clores' for help finding their lost family. State Police were
called to help in the search. They in turn had called the Marine Corp for
help since one of the fathers was a Colonel in the Marines. Clore
explained the situation to me and asked if I would help in the search by
taking the two fathers to the river so that they could search the river
bank area near my house. I said "of course." When they arrived, I
took them down to the river. Fifty feet long trees were being carried
down the river, at speeds of forty miles per hour. We started pushing
through the underbrush but we were making little progress. I judged the
river to be safe enough for me to use the kayak, figuring that this would
allow faster access to the search upstream. I told them to continue
with their push through the underbrush and that I was going back up to
the house to get my boat. Running up the path to the house, my face
was bright red and I was gasping for breath from the run up the hill.
I grabbed the kayak, strapped on my life jacket, grabbed my paddle and
put the kayak on my shoulder. Down the hill I went, this time taking
it slow and careful, I didn't need a sprained ankle. Upon reaching
the river I slipped the boat into the water, it was very easy to do since
the water was up so high. Normally I would have to lower it down
a ten-foot embankment. In this case all I had to do was slide it horizontally
into the water amongst the trees. As I started to paddle out
into the river, I realized how easy it was to paddle the boat. The
kayak only draws an inch and a half of water with one person in the boat.
Because all of the rocks in the river were covered by at least ten feet
of water, it was really smooth paddling, even up the river. I soon
caught up with the two fathers that were still push slowly through the
underbrush on their trek up the river bank. I told them that I would
scout ahead with the kayak. I paddled toward the big island that is just
below the confluence when I saw two Marine Corp helicopters coming down
the Rapidan River searching for the two lunatics. As I reach the
down river end of the island. Paddling was becoming more difficult
and because the river was so high, there weren't any rocks to sit behind,
and rest. My driving eagerness to find the duo was because I wanted
to say a few choice words to them about scaring their family and especially
the wife that was four months pregnant. With the helicopter overhead
I decided to end my part in the search. As it was, it took the search
party another two hours to find them. It seems that they sort of made it
through the confluence but tore a hole in the bottom of their boat as it
ran into the big island. That was a really scary situation for them
as they almost drowned there. They finally were able to drag the boat ashore
and propping it upside down against a boulder, they were able to get through
the next six hours out of the elements. They were suffering from hypothermia
and exposure when they were finally rescued. When I turned the kayak downstream,
it took me approximately four minutes to get back to my landing.
It had taken me thirty minutes to paddle upstream to the island.
I had to leave the kayak at the lower part of the path as I was quite exhausted.
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In June of 1965, while serving aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Firebush we were on a scientific expedition in the south Atlantic in a zone called the Bermuda Triangle. Two Cutters were chartered by the University of Texas and MIT on a seismagraphic study of the ocean bottom. The Firebush's job was to set in place sonar bouys to receive the sound sent to the ocean floor by the other Cutter dropping explosive charges over the side.
Some of the seamen decided before we left Base St. George in New York, our home port, that we would try our hand at deep sea fishing, so we brought what we thought would do the job. The 60 pound test line proved inadequate for the task as the first fish we hooked was a ten foot long gray shark, at least that's what its color was. The shark calmly swam up and took the raw meat we had attached to the hook and swam off with it, all the line that was attached to it and the rod and reel. Our next attempt was a little more creative. We had the machine shop modify a coat hook, you know the thing that is attach to the back of a door to hold your coat, into a five inch long fishing hook. For a fishing line we attached to hook to the main towing cable, the one we use to tow other ships. The reel was the main towing winch with about two thousand feet of three inch steal cable. The next attempt in deep sea fishing was more rewarding. We put a large hunk of raw beef on the hook and fed out about one hundred feet of cable to troll behind the ship. It didn't take long, a shark swam calmly up to the bait, swallowed it and began to swim off. This time a simply push of the button on the winch and whirrrrrrr in came the bewildered shark, all fifteen feet of it.
After several hours of this method we had about five sharks hanging by their tails dangling down from a cable about twenty feet about the fantail(back deck of the ship). The Animal, a pet name given to a six foot five seaman named Spielburg had come up with the idea of extracting teeth from the sharks. The Animal was all muscle and thought, using brute strength that he could do anything. The rest of us mortals usually used the thought process since we didn't have the brute strength to do most menial tasks quickly and efficiently. In this instance Animal was thinking less than usual, when he drew his bosons knife, a six inched folding knife, from his pocket. I called these knives, "folding swords," every seaman had one. The knife also had a six inch marlin spike which folded out as well. A marlin spike is a rounded smooth metal tapered at one end tool, used to part strands of rope so that the rope can be fashioned into tools such as fenders that would soften the blow of a ship and a dock making contact. Getting a little of the tract, now where were we? Oh yeah, Animal had pulled his trusty pocket sword out of its holder and using fantasy information that came from a action packed movie he had attended as a child, he commenced his bloody work. First after the sharks had been out of the water he plunged his knife into were he perceived the shark's brain to be, turning it several turns and exclaiming "that ones dead" and then going onto the next repeating the process. After he completed the so called removal of life from these critters he moved to the first one and started his shark dentistry. You know this is pretty tricky on a shark if you think of all the extra sets of teeth this fifteen foot creature has. While he was working on the one, the shark hanging along side of it decided he wasn't dead quite yet and raised his meter wide head and commenced to try and take Animal's head off, good thing it missed. Animal's comment was "he is supposed to be dead, it worked in the movie I saw!" "Duh, we all chimed in, maybe its is a ghost." He repeated is ill gotten method of killing the shark after about a hour, because we were staying clear of this vigorously struggling creature with all those long nasty teeth. Needless to say it took most of that day to render these monstrous creatures motionless. I don't remember if he actually accomplished his dentistry mission but it was memorable.
One morning while
cruising along two hundred miles from any shore, we were working on the
buoy deck with the Chief Boson who was directing our work on painting the
ship. We constantly chipped and painted the ship no matter where
we were. The Chief who was vertically challenged, at about five feet
tall, had just taken off his hat, tilting his head upward toward the sky
to wipe sweat from his bald head, when out of a perfectly clear and warm
sky came a large yellowish and milky mess that landed on his upturned
face and bald head. It flowed down the front of his facing dripping off
the end of his nose and lower lip. As soon as the five of us saw
what had happened, we couldn't contain ourselves and fell on the deck rolling
around contorting with laughter. The Chief managed to get out "don't you
dare laugh, that is an order." But he couldn't stop what was already
in progress. We all marveled at the fact that there wasn't a bird
in the sky anywhere. We assumed that a pile of dropping that large
could have only come from an Albatross, a bird with a six foot wingspan
and unlike common seagull which stay pretty close to shore, fly the entire
oceans of the world and only return to shore mate.
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When I was a heating mechanic for Exxon in the Washington DC area. It was 98F a hot August day in Washington DC. I got a no heat call from the Embassy of Sudan on Massachusetts Avenue. I said to my dispatcher "NO Heat are you crazy look at the thermometer, its 98 out here, didn't they mean no air conditioning?" He said he was sure it was a no heat call. When I arrived at the Embassy I tentatively knocked on the door not knowing what to expect. The door opened and there standing in front of me was a man dressed in a fur hat, long johns top and bottoms with a full length fur coat wrapped around him, shivering from the cold. I asked if he was sick or something as I was afraid to get too close to him. He was delighted to see me and invited me in to fix the furnace as soon as I could. I hurried down to the furnace room and started to work on the problem. The entire time I was working on fixing it, he stood there shivering wildly as if he had malaria or something. When I finally got the furnace fired up, he stood in front of the open door of the furnace warming himself in front of the fire. After about 20 minutes he warmed to a point that his teeth stopped chattering. He finally explained why he was so cold.
Being from Sudan
where in the capital city of Khartoum the normal average temperature is
120 F. 98 is quite a bit colder than what he was used to and needed
as much heat as possible. He also explained that North African and
Middle Eastern countries that made treaties with the former Soviet Union
had real problems staffing their embassies with people from their countries,
because even in the summer months the temperature, say in Moscow, is only
in the 60's. Most of the countries involved could not staff these
embassies during the winter months and finally just didn't maintain a presence
at all in the Soviet Block countries.
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Mark Ornoff, our Dentist and Ruth Anne's cousin, called on Friday night to invite Ruth Anne and me to a once a year event on Lake Accotink in Springfield, Virginia called the Annual Cardboard Boat Race. This race takes place the first weekend in June each year and this was the Second Annual Cardboard Boat Race.
We drove up to Springfield twenty-five miles north of our house. It took a few minutes to orient myself to the location of Lake Accotink, as I hadn't been there for about ten years. Well I found the road but as I got closer to the park we realized we had a long wait. Evidently, by the length of the line of cars trying to get into the park, the event had been well publicized. It took me about fifteen minutes to get to one of the parking control people. They told me that the parking was full up and we would have to park back in Springfield and ride a shuttle bus back to the lake. I asked if there was any handicap parking left down there, explaining that my wife Ruth Anne would have problems taking the shuttle. The parking control gal, called on her two way radio to someone down in the park and after consulting with them said, "we'll let you drive down and drop your passenger off." So down I went into the park. There was a long line of traffic moving slowly down the road and at one point came to a total stop to allow a carnival truck that was extra wide for the narrow park road to pass. When we finally reached the park we were greeted by another parking control gal asking us what we wanted. I asked if there was any handicap parking available and she replied "wait here" as she ran off through the adjacent parking lot. She emerged saying that there was two spaces available at the far end of the lot. We parked under a maple tree for shade, quickly grabbing my camera and tripod. We hurried up the blacktop path, past the fast and furious carnival rides toward the lake. There was a lot of folks at the carnival rides but a bigger crowd awaited us at the top of the hill overlooking the lake. We hurried up the path as fast as Ruth Anne could go with her cane. I worried that we were late and we might miss some of the race. As Ruth Anne hurried past the crowd toward the concession stands and the pedal boat marina, I stopped on the blue stone dam to try to take pictures of the boat race from the opposite bank. Using my three-hundred milometer lense I was able to focus right into the faces of the racers.
As I took my post on the bank, I quickly assembled my camera on its tripod and then started to scan the scene that was unfolding in front of me.
Some of the cardboard craft that lay in the lagoon on the other side of the water from me had names like, Polka Dot, Swiss Cheese, Alligator, Surfboard, Pirate, Submarine Pontoon, Rowing Sailboat, Flying Saucer, Bat, Tiger Shark, Grapenstein, UFO, Dragon and other indescribable "Cardboard Boats." The race rules are that the boats are to be constructed of nothing more than cardboard and made water tight using every day normal materials that you can buy in a hardware store. The most novel material used to cover the hull of one of the boats powered by a mother daughter crew was plastic wrap. Others used electrical tape, duct tape and builders foam used to close holes around windows.
I scanned the scene looking for cousin Mark, but I was not used to seeing him in disguise. As different race heats were called by the announcer I heard "father and son; father and daughter; mother and son; mother and daughter; small craft; large craft; and then the father and daughter category was called and there appeared one of the craziest boats I'd seen, a sailboat with the Jolly Roger (pirate flag) being flown for the mast head, that was being rowed, backwards, of course like a row boat that it was. This was being rowed by a six-foot-four inch man in a pirates outfit with a patch over one eye. His crew member was a tiny girl that was announced to be his niece. I took a lot of film of the race and wasn't quite sure of the rowing backward pirate, but it was just the crazy thing cousin Mark would do.
The race started at the start/finish line up on the sand. They proceeded counter clock wise around floating markers. They had to go complete around one of the farthest ones before proceeding to the finish line. Some of the boats were of poor construction and sank as soon as they reach the water. I guess I should tell you that the rules prohibit testing these cardboard craft prior to the race. The sponsors of the race had plenty of rescue craft and life guards available for the event. In cousin Mark's case it took fourteen months to construct this craft, since he had never built a boat before and knew nothing on how to construct one. I saw a boat manned by four boys that had exceptional high sides and was narrower than a canoe. As soon as the boys pushed it into the water, they were already in deep trouble. They couldn't get into it once it was afloat. They tried flinging themselves over the high side of the boat, but only manage to capsize it. One boat with three boys in it got about twenty-five feet and commenced to soak up water sinking into the lake. A fast motorized rubber pulled along side and rescued the occupants. Oops, I meant too say "motorized rubber boat, pulled along side to rescue the soaked-to-the-skin ex-crew members of the sinking cardboard boat". Please note that all the participants in the race were required to be able to swim and were equipped with life jackets that actually worked.
Most of the boats were successful in their design and float ability. Some were quite ingenious, one having paddle wheels being cranked by crew members. There was one that was decorated as a flying saucer and had crew hanging out the windows paddling the craft, but in this case the crew needed to work better together as the craft continually spun round and round. The next crazy craft that I saw was a fifteen-foot alligator boat, complete with head, tail and of course the body, being paddled along by two crew members.
Cousin Mark and his niece came in first in their category, somehow. Mark had to use eyes in the back of his head to steer a course through the other boats and get around all of the floating markers correctly.
After the first heat was over, meaning that all the boats had run the race, the second half was called into play to the surprise of the racers. The winning boats had survived and had won in their classes in the race, but now the officials wanted all the winners to race each other regardless of the class. Mark wasn't sure that his boat would stay afloat for another race but ran over to it and got what water was in it bailed out.
This race looked and was a free-for-all between all the boats. Mark's boat was rammed from the rear while he was busy rowing, facing the boat that was baring down on his seat. While he was concentrating on the one that was about to come to a rest in his lap, he plowed into the rear of another boat. It sort of looked like slow motion bumper cars. It was a fiasco but all had a great time and most had to swim into shore because of sinking cardboard boats.
After the race the contestants left their boats to be dumped into a dumpster since they were too waterlogged to do anything else with. Top
Every time my sister Beverly would go down to Florida to visit her mother in law, she would buy something for my sister Dolores. She sent Del a Alligator Nut Cracker on one of her trips. Del discussed that gift with Bev, saying it sure would be nice if Bev could send her one of those cute, little, tiny live alligators they had seen on a Florida visit back in the Forties. So one day while Del was living on Harmon Drive in Mamaroneck NY, the doorbell range, Del opened the door to a rather frazzled looking Postal Employee, you know a mailman. He gingerly handed a foot long cardboard box with holes in the side to Del. The Box was sort of battered looking with a lot of excess tape wrapped around one of the ends. The mailman mumbled something about, "the thing got out of the box in the Post Office and it took a lot of postal employees to get it back into the box. Del immediately recognized the package to contain the long awaited alligator from Florida. She thanked the relieved mailman as he hastily retreated to his Postal Truck. Del quickly took the package to the bathroom running some water into the bathtub and gingerly emptying the Alligator into the bathtub. She was totally amazed that the Alligator in the twelve inch box was now twenty four inches in length. Del could only imagine the chaos in the Post Office when the Alligator got loose, no wonder the mailman looked so haggard. After putting the creature into the tub, Del had to tell someone about the Alligator. She called her mom in Harrison NY the next town over. As she got mom on the phone, out of the corner of her eye, she saw her oldest son Rikky stripping off all of his clothes and start to get into the bathtub with the Alligator. She dropped the phone running top speed down the hall to grab him just as he stepped into the tub. Del asked Rikky what he thought he was doing and he replied, "I was going to play with his new pet Alligator.
Del and Mort,
oops, my mistake, Mort doesn't go near things that don't look Human and
he is particular which Humans he should go near. Anyway, Del not Mort,
tried feeding the thing but it wouldn't eat anything, I guess it was still
waiting for Rikky to get into the tub with it. She sent it over to
me next hoping that I would be able to care for it. Mom put her foot
down on this strategy, thinking the thing might get out and have all of
us for dinner. Our next move was to contact Westchester Community
College where our brother Lloyd was enrolled. The Biology department
was interested but we decided that we didn't want the Alligator cut up
for an experiment. We finally donated it to the Bronx Zoo where we hope
it lived a long and well fed life.
Top
A few years ago
I identified a large colony on ants to be Harvesters like ants. They were
eating a 40 foot high Northern Ash into dormancy in August, rather than
its normal time of November. I tried to remove them using the digging up
the nest which was not very good, to pesticides which didn't help the other
below ground dwellers. I even tried blow torching them as they came
down the tree to protect their nest, but I soon discovered that they were
much smarter than me and adapted very quickly to my tactics. This was a
little frightening. I then tried researching them and was able to reduce
their numbers from tens of thousands to several hundred which is more manageable
in my small back yard. The method I used was quite natural, I spent
the entire winter heavily feeding black birds such as grackles and starlings,
which seem to like eating ants. By spring when the ants
came out
of hibernation the birds knew where to find food and the ants became their
spring time meal. I don't want to completely annihilate a species
but not let them completely overrun my plants.
My question
to you is, do Harvesters eat termites like other species of Ants?
Harry
What do the ants look like? Do they have a sting? I don't think they could be harvester ants like the ones I study, because their venom is very poisonous and birds would not eat them. Many species of ants eat termites; I don't know if yours do.
D Gordon
Deborah, a few
years ago I identified a large colony on ants to be Harvesters. They were
eating a 40 foot high Northern Ash into dormancy in August, rather than
its normal time of November. I tried to remove them using the digging up
the nest which was not very good, to pesticides which didn't help the other
below ground dwellers. I even tried blow torching them as they came
down the tree to protect their nest, but I soon discovered that they were
much smarter than me and adapted very quickly to my tactics. This was a
little frightening. I then tried researching them and was able to reduce
their numbers from tens of thousands to several hundred which is more manageable
in my small back yard. The method I used was quite natural, I spent
the entire winter heavily feeding black birds such as grackles and starlings,
which seem to like eating ants. By spring when the ants
came out of hibernation
the birds knew where to find food and the ants became their spring time
meal. I don't want to completely annihilate a species but not let
them completely overrun my plants.
My question to
you is, do Harvesters eat termites like other species of Ants?
Harry
What do the ants look like? Do they have a sting? I don't think they could be harvester ants like the ones I study, because their venom is very poisonous and birds would not eat them. Many species of ants eat termites; I don't know if yours do.
D Gordon
The damnedest and scariest thing I ever saw, was when I was about 8 years old. I was at Oakland Beach next to Rye Beach at Playland, you know up the Long Island Sound on the mainland near Portchester NY, a distance of 30 miles northwest of New York City.
As I was saying,
I was doing my usual fun thing to do, diving and swimming underwater for
as long as I could hold my breath and then coming up for air and doing
it again and again. As I came up for air this time, right in front
of me, skimming across the water was a pair of eyes, set about, what looked
to me about 8 inches across. Well I didn't wait around to see what
it was, but jumped to my feet and ran right across the top of the water
till I ran out of beach and I was gasping for breath on the boardwalk.
It took me ten years of research to figure out what it was. With
the help of my best friend, Lada Simek, who is now a professional diver,
we finally figured it out. First we ruled out a hammerhead shark
due to the 3 feet depth of the water where I was at the time. What
we finally came up with was a snorkel with two hook curved tubes with a
plastic ball in each tube that when a person using such snorkel would dive
down in the water, the balls would stop water from entering the users mouth.
Some kid was swimming toward me underwater with just the snorkel tubes
sticking out of the water. My eyes were still blurry from swimming
with my eyes open in salt water, I only got a quick glance, the balls in
the snorkel appeared to be two eyes. That kid is probably still laughing.
Top
The trees are still shedding their leaves, what a spectacular site. The bright oranges, reds, and yellows mixing with the greens of the pines and holly trees with their bright red berries makes such a grand image. The air has a tinge of smoke in it from fireplaces being started for the first time this season. Neighbors are starting to rake leaves into large piles. We have to keep alert when driving around the neighborhoods as children tend to play in the large piles of raked leaves. I went to the local department store the other night seeking to buy a new snow shovel. The sales person said they had a run on snow shovels and were out of them. I told her that I had been in a week ago and she told me that they had not received any shovels as of yet. So evidently people are expecting a worse winter than last if they have already bought out an entire shipment in a few days. Maybe I should take this as an omen and go up to West Virginia or Pennsylvania and buy a snowblower for the big snows that probable will be knocking at our door this year. Yesterday, when my neck was giving me some pain, I started to drift off into a dream, imagining myself lying on hot sand, on a beach with a view of a glorious tropical ocean. I could feel the hot sand and ocean mist sapping the aches and pains out of my body. I guess I am just feeling my age and am in need of some sort of tropical holiday.
November and December will be a marathon month for my son Eric as he needs to be in fifteen different cites in a four week time frame. He starts his marathon off in Buffalo NY on the 9th of November, then three days later he needs to be in Rochester NY a hour and a half drive from Buffalo NY. So I guess he plans to stay over to keep the transportation costs down. He then thought he would rent a car and drive back home from Rochester. I advised him that he should take a plane from Buffalo to Washington so that we could pick him up at the Airport. On the 18th of November he will be flying into Toledo, Ohio for an interview on the 19th at the Medical College of Ohio. That afternoon he flies to Farmington Connecticut to the University of Connecticut for the interview of the 21st and then he rents a car for the drive to Hershey Pennsylvania for his appointment at Penn State on the 22nd. He then drives back to Richmond, Virginia where he currently goes to school. Two days later he hops on a plane to Memphis Tennessee for his appointment on the 25th, then takes a short hop plane ride to Louisville Kentucky, where he rents another car to drive north to the University of Kentucky at Lexington for his November 30th interview. He leaves the next day for Louisville to catch a plane to Albuquerque, New Mexico for his December 2nd appointment and then takes another short hop to Phoenix Arizona for his December 6th. I am getting exhausted just typing the information out. Anyway he goes on from there to Richmond, Virginia once again and I hope catches up with a few days of sleep before going on to Chapel Hill, North Carolina and then to Norfolk, Virginia, then on to Brown, in Providence RI, then next to Rochester Minnesota to the Mayo Clinic and then on to Dartmouth College in Lebanon New Hampshire. I hope I didn't put you into a sound sleep yet.
As it turned out, he flew back from Buffalo and I drove him to Rochester, New York from our home in Stafford, Virginia. It only took us about ten hours driving time in the snow. We spent the night in quarters furnished to us by the Hospital and returned home the following day. It gave me a chance to buy really warm clothing for the winters down here. It seems that for each climate zone in the country the winter clothing is made for that area, so if you want really warm clothes, you buy them in really cold country.