Back from Seattle, I now turn around and head to Georgia for a few day's vacation. My travel season is almost to an end. It will be good to be home.
It's still over 100 degrees here (it was 72 in Seattle) and the birds on my feeders are feeling the heat. But as fortune smiles, I have finally won the war against the ants. For weeks, my hummingbird feeders were swarmed by ants, who basically destroyed the rubber tips of the feeders, thus ruining them. So I bought a new feeder. The ants returned. So I bought little ant traps, the kind that "ants are attracted to the bait, and carry it back to the nest, killing the entire nest guaranteed!" The ants returned again. I turned to an aerosol pesticide and sprayed over 70 of them in one sitting. Still they returned, going in and out of the ant traps with little effect. My hummingbirds couldn't drink because the little drink holes had ants going in and out, and the liquid holder was full of drowned ants. Then, one day, the ants were gone. I haven't seen one for 3 days now. Perhaps the traps worked? Perhaps they gave up? Or maybe they performed a strategic fall-back and plan to regroup with larger numbers. Either way, peace has returned to the porch. Nature is back to the imbalance of my favor, with one part of the ecosystem wiped out. Now the hummingbirds have returned, and can now feed and fight each other to the death.
More when I return.
