Bugs and birds

Cocktail hour on the deck was 5:00-6:30 last night on a warm and muggy evening. I noticed seagulls, a lot of them, flying back and forth along the coast and soon saw that they were snapping bugs out of the air. Also a few on the water, pecking. Not sure what was hatching, nothing apparent on the land.

This reminded me, of course, of Flying Ant Day, a warm evening in August when ants come out of their nests in the ground and fly away, literally thousands of them. Terns appear (where have they been all summer?) and have a feast. Seagulls don't really bother.

The ants also emerge from our crawl space and find their way through cracks in the wood stove chimney. Only hundreds, probably, but it's an odd feeling to watch them crawl, plague-like, along the walls and the floor towards the floor-to-ceiling windows and apparent freedom. Some of them are inch-long. The vacuum cleaner is employed.

I'm not sure why the seagulls last night were bothering. It seems a lot of wasted flying energy for a very small protein reward. But seagulls are perhaps the most efficient and elegant flying machines (I've seen them hold firm in a 30-mph wind, barely moving their wings, and when they did move, they made good progress with minimal effort); perhaps the bugs were their cocktails and chips on a warm night.

For the first time this year we had several ant eruptions, not one big giant one. For the last one, I did not employ the vacuum, leaving the windows a-crawl. All ants were gone in the morning; they must have found cracks in the baseboards through which to reach their destiny.

It did get cool last night, finally, as the sun went down. Yes, it's September 24, not August 24. It's too warm. None of this should be true at this time of year.