Category Archives: General

Solenopsis invicta (or wagneri)

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The first time I heard about fire ants was about 50 years ago when I was in junior high. It was in Mr. Dorsey’s sixth or seventh grade science class. He was scornful of a state program to eradicate fire ants in south Georgia by aerial spraying of insecticides. He said it would never work; what they needed to do was inject poison into each fire ant nest individually.

That would have been a more ecologically sound approach, since aerial spraying would kill lots of other potentially beneficial bugs and would have killed very few fire ants. Mound-by-mound poisoning might have provided some control in limited locations, but it would have been impossible to find every nest.

For the next couple of decades I didn’t think once about fire ants. And then, one day when I was in graduate school in the early ‘80’s I took at run out into the country behind my parents’ house. For some reason at about the two-mile point I stopped, maybe to take a breather or to let a car pass. I happened to stand in tall grass right on top of a fire ant mound. It was only a matter of seconds before at least one fire ant made it over my shoe and sock to my ankle, where it stung me.

At that point I started noticing fire ant mounds, and once I started noticing them, they seemed to be everywhere. Most sources say they were originally introduced into North America at the port of Mobile around 1940. For a while it seemed like the invasion of fire ants was unstoppable, and they were going to spread and overwhelm everything. The limit to their range seems to be low temperatures and dry conditions.

This is a USDA map that shows the potential range of fire ants. The lightest blue indicates areas where expansion of the range is unlikely. The red is areas with confirmed populations.

fireantrange

This is a USDA map on a University of Texas site showing the history of the fire ants’  expansion:

ifaustdist

If I’m reading the map correctly, Floyd County, where we live, is in the 1975-1984 expansion, which is consistent with my impress of when they started showing up around here.

If you don’t have fire ants, you can consider yourself lucky. They are extremely aggressive when defending their nests. If the nest is disturbed, they swarm out in masses and, if you happen to be in the way, they swarm up your feet until they find flesh, and then they latch onto your skin with their pinchers and swing their abdomens around as they sting repeatedly.

I have read at least one Web site that compared the pain intensity of various stings. This site gives a fairly low ranking to the fire ant sting, below a yellowjacket. It’s hard to remember pain levels from 30 years ago, but my impression at the time was not consistent with that. I would have ranked it about the same as a yellowjacket sting, but with longer-lasting effects.

These days my overall impression is that fire ants seem to have reached some kind of equilibrium population. I don’t seem to see as many mounds along the side of the road as I used to. That’s far from a scientific observation, though, and my impression may be wrong. The extension service mentions a pathogen (among other natural enemies) that attacks fire ants. Maybe that has something to do with it.

This is a fire ant nest behind our house. It’s a foot away from an existing nest which I disturbed about a month ago when I borrowed some dirt to use in another place in the yard. You may have trouble reading the tape measure; the mound is about a foot in its widest dimension. It’s a relatively small nest at this point.

fireantnest

The nests are quite deep. It’s easy to drive a stick six inches into such a nest, which I did.

closerviewofants

I tried to manipulate the image so the ants are more visible. These ants are darker than the typical red fire ants I most often see around here. I keep my distance when I do something like this. This nest is in line for a dose of fire ant poison, which seems to either kill the nest or drive the ants to some other place.

If you have ants you think might be fire ants, I suggest that you not stick a finger into the mound to test it. Instead, try identifying them by pictures like these.

The title shows the popular scientific name Solenopsis invicta. However, these fire ants were first identified and named wagneri. At this point I’m not sure which name will win.

Fix it again, Tony

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When I was close to graduating with my journalism degree back in 1973, my parents decided I needed a slightly better car, so my father took me to a used foreign car dealer near downtown Atlanta. The dealership was in a multi-story warehouse. Up on about the third floor, they had two Fiats. One was Petty blue, and the other was yellow. I liked the yellow one, so that’s the one I got.

This is what it looked like.

Fiat124sportcoupe

This is not my car, but it looks exactly like it. It was a 1971 Fiat 124 Sports Coupe. I loved it. Despite the common perception, it was a modern, sophisticated, reliable car. It had four-wheel disk brakes; an aluminum, double-overhead cam engine; and a five-speed transmission. It drove like a sports car and got 30 miles per gallon. I drove it all the time I worked at the newspaper in Augusta and I drove it to California when I moved to Lake Tahoe for a while. Then I drove it back home and kept it until I went to graduate school in 1980. I sold it a few years after that to a fellow graduate student.

It never lived up, or down, to the old joke that Fiat stood for Fix It Again Tony.

When I was in graduate school, Leah, who I had not seen in years, was working in Atlanta. One day she called me because she was having some problems with her car. This is the 27-year-old Leah with her car.

leah and her fiat2

It was a Fiat 124 Spider. It was basically the same car I had but in a sports car body. The picture is a fuzzy print I scanned. I can tell from the bumper that the spider was a newer model than mine, but we can’t figure out exactly what year it was.

Unfortunately, Leah’s Fiat ended up wrecked. And unfortunately, we didn’t see each other again for many more years.

Leah and I would both love to have either one of those cars right now. It’s possible to find one on the used market for a not-too-unreasonable price. One used-car price guide says that coupe prices range from around $5000 to $10,000, and spider prices range from around $5000 to $20,000. Another web site says that very few coupes survive today, mainly because the bodies rust so badly, but that the running gear of many coupes lives on in spiders.

Here’s what made me think of 40-year-old Fiats.

fiatmanuals

I found the original manuals for my old Fiat in a trunk that I hauled around through college and for years after that. For some reason the manuals didn’t make it to the person I sold the car to.

Clearing out my mother’s house has been like an archeological dig of my own memory. I feel sure I’ll have more posts based on the memories I have excavated.

Once I was a runner

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I wasn’t an athlete in high school, and certainly not in college. When I graduated and started working at the newspaper in Augusta, I started running regularly. I didn’t run for conditioning, or to compete, or to associate with other runners. I just liked to run. I liked running up hills, I liked running in miserably hot weather, and I liked running in cold weather. I felt good when I ran and I felt good after I ran.

When I quit the newspaper in 1976 and moved to Lake Tahoe for about 18 months, I started running more seriously. The great thing there was that I could run on dirt trails in the woods. In early summer of 1977 I decided to run the Silver State Marathon, which took place around Labor Day near Carson City, Nevada. That was my first race. I trained all summer, gradually increasing my distance, if not my speed. I was happy to finish in under four hours, although about midway in the race I developed a blister on one heel that was about the size of a silver dollar. How appropriate.

When I started graduate school at Georgia Tech in 1980, I got even more serious about running. I had an eight-mile course that I ran every day after school. I wasn’t interested in racing. I enjoyed the time I spent on my solitary runs. I would see someone jogging along my running course and think that I wasn’t like them; I was not a jogger, I was a runner. I couldn’t imagine not running.

Eventually I decided to run a few races. I don’t remember how many I ran in my racing career, but it was less than 10.

These race numbers were in an old trunk I found while cleaning out my mother’s house.

racenumbers

I don’t know which races the unlabeled numbers came from. The Mountain Goat 8 Mile was run at Berry College. The course wound around a dirt road on Lavender Mountain, not too far from where we live now. I also don’t remember the times I ran in all those races, but I was fairly happy with them.

The last race of my career was a 15 km run, the Chieftains Road Race, held in 1984 at Berry College. The certificate in the upper right of the picture is from that race. The winner of the 15-km race was from Mexico City. He ran and won the 5-k race to warm up for the 15-k. His pace was about 5:50 per mile. My pace in that race was a little over 6:22 a mile, the best I ever did. I was fifth in my age group (30-34), and I actually beat the fastest woman runner by about a second.

Not long after that race my knee started hurting. It got bad enough that I had to stop running shortly after that. I swam for exercise for about a year, and then started running again. Slowly. Very slowly. And then not at all. I miss running. I even dream about running. Now I can hardly run across the street.

But once I was a runner.

One thing leads to another

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Some tasks aren’t as straightforward as they seem. Sometimes things have to be done in a certain sequence; you can’t do one thing until something else is done first, and sometimes the chain of things that have to be done goes back a ways.

We ran out of firewood this winter. Also, the trees on the east side of the house are getting tall enough that they’re beginning to block our view. So it seemed like a good time to start cutting a bunch of trees. One thing led to another, and I had about five trees down. Now that we have a chipper, I planned to use that to make mulch to put on the path I use when I walk Zeke and Lucy around the house.

You can see the how the trees are blocking the view to the east. On the lower left you can see a little bit of the trees I have cut.

obstructed view

I learned a few years ago that I need to take care of the trees as I cut them rather than cutting a bunch of trees and then cleaning up. I once cut a large number of trees and ended up with a disaster area that took a couple of years to finally clean up. From now on I clean up as I go.

So, I intended to chip the limbs for the path right away, but first I needed to do some work on the path. I had been intending to level out the path where it leads from the back of the house around to the east into the leach field, but a lot of other things were higher on the priority list. So now I had a bunch of trees with a bunch of limbs to chip, but the path wasn’t ready for the chips. Before I could chip the limbs, I had to level out the path.

It’s easy enough in principle. All I needed to do was cut into the slope on the uphill side and dump the dirt onto the lower side. But when I cut into the slope, I needed material for a low retaining wall. So I had to make a trip to Lowe’s for garden wall blocks. I got 40 blocks, which is not enough.

Here’s the work in progress. The little line of blocks on the left took care of the 40 blocks I got.

dirt path2

As I worked up towards the back of the house I realized I needed to finish the retaining wall at the corner of the house that I started a little while ago. Make that a few years ago. It’s made of landscape timbers. Here’s the view down from the deck. The landscape timber on the left is part of the existing wall. The three others were left over from some work I did in the front of the yard.

dirt path

Today I got the landscape timber retaining wall finished and backfilled. Now I can restart on leveling the path, and then I can get about 80 to 100 more garden wall blocks and make the low retaining wall along the path. And then, after touching up the level of the path, I can bring the chipper around and start chipping the limbs.And then I can cut some more trees.

Unless I run into another chore that needs to be done first.

Old School

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I had occasion late Tuesday night to drive around for a while. I put diesel in the car, I dropped by Walmart, I drove the long way home, all the way around Texas Valley

I kind of like driving around late at night like that, when most normal people are in bed. I could almost count on my fingers the number of people I saw. The streets were nearly empty. Traffic lights cycled from red to green, but no one drove through the intersections. The streetlights were on, but with no headlights on the streets, the city looked dark. Rome looked like a movie set after the lights were turned off and all the actors went home.

When you’re driving around those empty streets, you notice every car. If they’re behind you, you notice when they turn off. You see the police officer in his patrol car, and you know he sees you.

The service station was brightly lighted but almost deserted. No one else was at the pumps. The doughnut shop attached to the service station was closing. When I pulled up to the front of the station, the last doughnut shop employee looked out at me and then turned the lights out and disappeared.

I went back towards home and stopped at Walmart to get a couple of unnecessary things. It looks like after 11 PM is a good time to grocery shop at Walmart; no waiting in line. But I kind of doubt that Leah and I will start shopping that late.

As I was walking out of Walmart I heard someone calling something. I heard it twice before I turned around and a youngish man called “Hey, Old School” to me. He said he had walked all the way from his apartment and was short one quarter for what he wanted to buy. I gave him a quarter and asked if he needed more. He thanked me and said no. That was the only time I actually interacted with any person that night.

When I drove out Huffaker Road, instead of turning right onto Fouche Gap and driving the mile and a half up the mountain to our house, I kept going for a few miles to Texas Valley Road. And then, after about five miles, instead of turning right to drive along the mountain and then up the other side of Fouche Gap Road, I kept going straight to make the big loop around Rocky Mountain in the middle of the valley and come back to Fouche Gap Road from the other end.

I have bicycled Texas Valley Road quite a few times, but I couldn’t remember which way the road would turn, and how sharp the next curve was going to be. Along one stretch I had a feeling that the woods were different, but until I pulled sideways across the road to shine the headlights into the forest I couldn’t tell that the whole area had been logged since the last time I was there.

I drove slowly because the road is narrow and winding in some places, and because there are lots of deer around. I didn’t see a single car for the entire 20 miles, or any deer.

I think it was close to 1 AM when I got home. Not that late, but late enough for me.

I forgot about “Old School” until Leah and I were having huevos rancheros Wednesday for lunch at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants, Los Portales. Leah asked what “Old School” meant. I didn’t know, so I looked it up in the urban dictionary. Here’s what it says:

Anything that is from an earlier era and looked upon with high regard or respect. Can be used to refer to music, clothing, language, or anything really.

We had a laugh about that.