Gratuitous and random spider on my window.
So today's interactions with animals were both really cool and really weird, some interactions were both.
The day started with me taking my daughter to school on the scooter. She has to be there by 8:30 so this was about 8:15. We were about halfway there and doing about 30 miles an hour when a rather large butterfly came out of the jungle to my right being chased by a bird. The bird wasn't huge, maybe the size of my fist with some tail feathers. Because of the air currents and the angle they came at me, and they were forced down to the bottom half of the scooter and flew between the front part of the scooter and where I sit. And in the time it took for my brain to register that there was a butterfly and bird coming out of the jungle, the bird ran smack into my knee. I was honestly worried about the bird. So we pulled the scooter over, flipped a u-turn and went back to see if it was on the road. It wasn't. We looked around for it for a couple minutes but not finding it, I assumed it was okay. Still weird though.
On the return to my house I noticed two things: one, a super cool millipede that was beige color, just chilling like they do right out in front of my doorstep. And two, that the ant highways were really big running across the path that leads to my house. On the days the ants are out, it's important to watch where you step even the tiny ones pack of mean punch. What was different about today though, was that I have never seen these ants before. They were big, like the size of army ants, but they were an orangey red, and they had the head and mandibles of soldier ants. So if you've seen any colonies before you'll be familiar with the worker ants that are smaller in whatever species it is, and the soldiers that have over-enlarged heads with visible mandibles. Their sole purpose is to attack anything that's threatening the colony. The ants I saw today mostly looked like soldier ants, and this is important for later. They were carving a path from the jungle on the left of my house across the yard right in front of the front step and up the only walkway I have through the jungle to where my car is.
And that was before I even came back from dropping my daughter off. I came in worked for a while, had some food. Later, my husband and I took a scooter ride down to Manzanillo just because I needed to take a break and stretch my legs. Not 5 minutes into the drive, he swerves the scooter and starts shaking his head. A pretty large flying beetle flew in his nose and got stuck. He had to hold the other nostril closed and blow out. We watched it pop out of his nose and fly away. This all without stopping the scooter.
My walkway really is just a tunnel path that has been carved through some bushes and trees. Walking through again, making sure to step over the ant highways, I saw some chaotic movement in the break of trees that is to the right of the path. I realized I was watching a snake make a kill strike on a frog. I caught the first strike and I watched as this thing slowly unhinged it's jaw and started to digest. It was super cool and about a foot and a half in front of me. If you seen a snake eat its prey, it's incredibly vulnerable in those few minutes that it takes to swallow the animal. They don't move around a lot as they begin to digest and it's critical that they're not really disturbed because it can force them to throw up their meal or even injure themselves trying to get away. So after a couple minutes, I left it to it and went on my way.
On the return, it was still there. So I ran to grab my husband so we could get a few more photos. When we got outside, it became super apparent that things had taken a turn for the snake. At some point, some kiddo had wrapped string around the tree and bushes right next to this little derp and he had managed not only to get himself wrapped up in it several times, he somehow managed to swallow some, in the middle of the string so it was attached to something in both directions and he was essentially trapped.
So as soon as I moved closer, he tried to slither away but he was still trying to swallow and was attached. At that point, things went from not great to worse as he wrapped himself up. Not knowing what type of snake this was, I wasn't too keen on getting super close, but Ry handed me his knife and I started cutting what I could off of him. We managed three cuts and that freed him but he did have quite a bit more string than I wanted him to hanging out of his mouth. But there was nothing doing, he was out of there faster than if I had handed him the check.
Not quite done with us for the day, the animal kingdom had one more up its sleeve. Gaia and I went to the market about 5:30 to get some brownie mix so we could take treats to school tomorrow. As we were leaving, my daughter made the mistake of lingering too long in the walkway by the ant highway. She managed to pick up a soldier on her flip flop. By the time we got into the car it had latched its mandibles into the top of her foot. And she started howling. She couldn't get it off-- if you've ever seen a soldier, you know the mandibles are huge.
Not my picture, just an example.
Not my picture, just an example.
Insert mom for the rescue. I, panicked and not-at-all chill, started literally beating this thing off her foot. Four, five, six...ten times before some part of it separated. But not all of it. I watched in horror as the head separated from the body and stayed buried in my daughter's foot and held on. All the while she is screaming at the top of her lungs. Can't imagine where she gets her
not-chill from. Anywho, I finally find a piece of cloth in the car that I can grab the head of this thing with and throw it on the ground. Crisis averted. We continue on to the market, run into her teacher at the store, get the groceries, and drive all the way back home.
We are getting out of the car and she doesn't want to put her feet down on the car floor to put flip flops back on because she is afraid that the ant is still alive. The words about it being dead are literally coming out of my mouth and dying on my lips because she looks down with my phone for light, and we see the headless body of this soldier stumbling around like some maniacal vendetta spider at the bottom floorboards beneath her. I cannot believe how long it survived. I wish I had taken a video before I put it out of its misery because it was as creepy as it was unbelievable to see this ant move around without a head.
We came in and told the story to Ryan
who thought it was really funny after he made sure she was okay. We carried on, and the brownies were really good.
That's all for now. Just another day in the jungle.
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