Hi! Mr. Nature here again, with another keen observation of our infinitely complicated natural world, also known as God’s Creation.
Yesterday I watched something I’d never seen before. Along the fringe of Patty’s garden, yellow-jackets were flying just an inch or two above the ground, looking like they were trying very hard to find a place to land. And every time one of them did land, one or two ants would attack and drive it off.
This went on for quite a while. A yellow-jacket is many times the size of one of these little brown ants, and could easily bite an ant in half with one clash of its jaws–but that seemed to make no impression on the ants at all. Later I found some videos online (just search for “ants vs. yellow-jackets,” and you’ll find a few of them) showing ants attacking yellow-jackets, usually in competition for food, or else because the yellow-jackets were trying to steal food already collected by the ants. In one video, a single black ant tries to repel half a dozen (!) yellow-jackets from a fallen pear.
It made me wonder–can ants feel fear? Do they know anything we would even recognize as fear? Or has God created them utterly without it? What would it be like, to have an ant’s consciousness? You can’t get any mammal to behave like that. Imagine one jackal trying to drive away five lions from the carcass of a gnu. He’d only try that if he had a mind like an ant’s. Or a very creative death wish.
Last week we found an unusual thing in the garden: a yellow-jacket crawling around because it had no wings. I think we can guess now what happened to its wings. Patty was worried about yellow-jackets making a nest in the garden; but the place is full of ants, and I don’t think the ants will allow it.
Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: which have no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest. –Proverbs 6:6-8
Observe the ways of living creatures. You’ll never run out of things to see–or think about.
On the last trip we made to the Adirondacks I found something out that I wouldn’t have guessed at.
We left early and decided to check in at a nice little motel in Keene Valley. They catered to backpackers and hikers and it was a lovely place to clean up after being grubby for days.
Before I go further, I would like to explain something about the way Dobie hiked. He would run up the trail, disappear around a corner, then come running back to us. He put on three times the mileage we did with all his running back and forth.
Anyway, we got to the motel and were pulling up in front when Dobie started to really react. His hackles stood up around his neck and he gave a low menacing growl. Completely unlike him. He jumped from the back seat into the front seat and was staring intently at the motel. The chambermaid was doing the rooms–nothing weird there–but he was glaring and growling and whining.
Let me say that this was quite a few years after our first backpacking trips. Dobie was now a lot older and he might have had some vision loss.
Suddenly it hit me. The maid was surrounded by large black plastic bags into which she was putting the linens that she had changed. Large, lumpy black bags.
Bears.
He had seen bears on the trail. We had not seen them because he was so far ahead of us. And of course, he came right back to us. Most black bears (unless it’s a sow who feels her cubs are in danger) mind their own business and prefer to avoid encounters.
Now so much fell into place. Dobie had never eaten much on the trail. When we would come down we would go to this nice bar and restaurant and get him a pound of the best hamburger meat I had ever eaten. He would wolf in down and sleep for hours. He must have been on high alert whenever we were hiking.
My poor little guy had been anxious and evidently did not like the bear aspect 
of hiking. He had had much more of an adventure than I could have guessed at. And probably more than once.