Ants

We like our Harvester ants, because Texas horned lizards (Horny toads) like Harvester ants. Although we see Horned lizards on Eaton Hill on occasion, they were once so common that children captured them, raced them, made thread leashes for them and paraded them around, and otherwise entertained themselves with the little guys. I had one woman tell me that as recently as ten years ago she had a Harvester ant hole by her porch and she used to sit on the porch and watch a large Horned lizard snap up ant after ant after ant, oblivious of his audience.

Horned lizards eat only Harvester ants so we keep an eye out for ours, and unless they have a mound where some small person can accidentally get into them we are happy to have them.

Above the Native American Village we have an access road that looks like this:

Walking along this road (this is, by the way, the same road as the one with the fossils) on my way to check water tanks I was looking down and happened to notice a small leaf moving along the ground. Kneeling for a closer look I found this ant, hard at work bringing home the bacon, so to speak.

In the next picture you can see he's getting close to his destination, as he is now in the tiny rocks that the ants have removed as they've built their home.

He's close! The main entrance is the dark area beyond the larger rocks, but he is right on top of a smaller side hole. (If you cannot see him, the small reddish-brow spot near the center of the picture is the leaf and the ant is just this side of the leaf.)

This is pretty much the same picture, only a lot closer.

He's on top of the leaf, now, and at this point he disappeared under the leaf and nobody came to help and the leaf didn't make it any further into the hole.

IT RAINED LAST NIGHT! 0.3 inches