Weird Weather Sparks Unusual Creature Behavior

What a winter in the Hamptons. After temperatures soared into the 50s and 60s in early December, they plummeted into the single digits just before the new year. Then in February, it did it again.

On the third day of this second close brush with zero, something strange I’d never seen before in Three Mile Harbor happened. I live on a hillside overlooking this harbor. Watching from our living room windows, I saw that the harbor was beginning to ice over. But paddling along where ice had not yet formed were about 100 ducks.

They were not in any discernible pattern. But occasionally, a few would take off briefly to flutter around and then quickly land again. I’d been told earlier that birds do this on very cold days to keep water from freezing on their wings. Maybe that’s what I was seeing.

Suddenly, a group of much larger birds appeared above the harbor, flying and swooping excitedly. They were big raptors of some sort, too far up for me to see if they were ospreys, eagles or hawks, but there was no mistaking what they were about. They began gliding over the ducks in big lazy circles. They were hungry. Their claws were out, they were looking down. Their main target would not be ducks. It would be fish. But in a pinch, ducks might do.

In response, the ducks began paddling furiously. There was method to it. They swarmed in toward one another, until they had formed themselves into an enormous defensive oval. It was quite a display. Wing tip to wing tip, they were presenting themselves as a floating feathered rug of ducks. Should one of the raptors swoop in they would be swarmed by duck beaks and fluttering wings. The ducks would not be easy prey. Wow.

After a while, the raptors, disappointed, flew off. With that, the ducks broke ranks and began paddling away from one another to become the disorganized flock they’d been before. Some 10 minutes later, some of the raptors circled back. So the ducks formed up again. But then the raptors again flew off, and after that, the ducks again broke ranks. What crazy behavior. New to me.

In March, my wife and I headed south for two weeks of sunshine and beach. We’d had enough. As we were leaving East Hampton, driving past the town green on our way to the airport, we noticed that a group of ducks was now paddling about in Town Pond. It has been almost three years since ducks have been in the pond. A prior administration had ordered the pond drained so algae, sediment, nitrogen and muck could be removed and the pond bottom repaired. When that work began, the commotion caused the ducks to fly away. The following year, clear water was pumped back in. But neither the ducks nor the swans or any other birds returned. However, this past summer, algae again bloomed in the pond. And now, suddenly, birds were in the pond again.

I’ve been told the village is once again considering removing the vegetation. If they do, I’d bet the birds will leave the pond again. Now, here on vacation, we’ve had another strange encounter with nature. Tiny black ants appeared, crawling around in the bathroom of our beachfront hotel. We reported the ants to the management, but nothing came of it. And so, when we watched further, we saw that the ants were just single-file parading along where the tiles met the walls and not anywhere else on the bathroom floor. We could live with that.

Over the next few days, these little ants marched very purposely along, some of them heading one way, others the other way. Perhaps they were carrying stuff back and forth to somewhere, but if they were, I couldn’t see it. Sometimes a particular ant would bump into another ant coming the other way. They’d both hesitate, then find a way to pass. This was a two-way highway operation, whatever it was.

I googled “black ants” on my phone, concerned about their bumping into each other. Did they have eyes? The answer was that they do. Do they have hearts? They do, though the hearts are not shaped like ours, and the fluid being pumped through is not like ours.

One night, I encountered a single ant, motionless, on the top of the white porcelain lid of the toilet tank behind the bowl. It was the first time I’d seen an ant anywhere other than in those highway lines. And it made me wonder — what was this all about? I decided that there were three possible explanations. And maybe a fourth.

Here are the three.

The ant, with great effort, somehow climbed up one side of the toilet tank. It’s 3 feet up. Exhausted from the effort, she/he is happy but taking a rest up there. The ant climbed up, and then, deliriously happy, sat down — but then had a heart attack and died. The ant had been ordered to explore what was up there and report back, but died before making his report. He/she died not happy about this.

And the fourth option, very unlikely, is that the ant shimmied down from the ceiling on a microscopic thread, but halfway down lost his grip, crashed down and died. But I could see no such thread. Then, the next morning, I went into the bathroom and the ants were all gone! Zero ants.

I thought the leader must have ordered them away, perhaps with the job, whatever it was, done.

But something soon convinced me otherwise. It was a spider, several feet up on one of the walls. From the ant’s perspective, this spider, a hundred times the size of any ant, must have been terrifying. Remember the movie War of the Worlds, when the aliens, each 80 feet tall, would appear in the hills striding toward town while emitting a horrifying ear-splitting moan that shook the Earth? That’s what was happening in ant world. They were running for their lives.

So I squashed it.

Such a strange winter. High temperatures in the 70s in the Hamptons in February. Temperatures near zero in March.

And lots to learn. And now, this week, winter is over and spring has sprung. But just a week ago, it snowed. Crazy. I wonder what nature will bring us next.