Nature’s Snugly, Ugly & The Ant That Sucked Life Out Of Him

The Nokiidaa Trail link boardwalk section of the St. John’s sideroad is now fully adapted – one visit is not enough to discover this short and popular trail on the boardwalk. It is also hard to believe that just last year in March the boardwalk was still under construction. The adaptation process went very well for everyone.


The population of the lady Wood duck is booming and the ducklings look so snugly and adorable. As a matter of fact this one looking in my direction is reminding me Mumble from the Happy Feet movie.


The Lady Bugs found are the real ones, not the Asian one which were released few years ago to get the aphids under control. I still remember when they used to crawl into our house, or seeing a cloud of them flying on our backyard. They were biting as well and had this orange juice coming out of them – yikes.


Who likes spiders? Not me, but they are nice little creatures great to photograph. This one is less than 10 mm in length, including the limbs. Not very big, but good light does help to get nice sharp image, okay, and a good macro lens as well. If you like spiders no worries many many different species crawl everywhere.


I don’t know what kind of insect on the photo below that is but I had to do lot of body bending around to get him to look at my camera.


The sad part is that the red ant was sucking life out of him. I didn’t notice at first, but I did notice that he didn’t look too good. For some reason an ant was attached to him and probably trying to kill him, while he was crawling around and anticipating that it will eventually get lost.


But what I did not notice was that little creature on the stone when I was processing my images. I could be wrong but I think I photographed a tick (bottom left corner photo below), that means I was so close.

Perhaps not all ticks cause Lyme disease. Perhaps the one bit me many moons ago was not the blacklegged tick. I was five or six years old when I was bitten and my mom took out fat tick from my wrist. I did not get any reaction and lost some blood thrown away with the dead tick.

Only forty five minute spent on the boardwalk today yet so much we discovered and only partial journey shared. I will share more stay tuned.

‘Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known’. ~ Carl Sagan