And at the end of the day, leaf cutters still busy!

A colony of  thousands of leaf-cutter ants forms a chain to file in an orderly fashion around my house to my large Virginia Creeper vine that hangs over my terrace. It is their intention to crunch the life out of leaf after leaf by grasping them in their razor jaws and slicing off neat packages to carry off to their nest.

I rattle the tiny logs of ant poison in the can to spill several small lines of poison over their trail, then scan the procession to watch them carry them off. I hate killing any part of nature, still I have a hunch that if I don’t fight back, that they will strip the entire garden of its leaves–every vine, plant and tree. As I fit the lid back on the can, I try to reassure myself that in most encounters in nature, one creature loses while the other wins. This is part of the plan. But still, I experience guilt as I watch yet another ant carry a pellet back to its nest.

Prompts for The Sunday Whirl 747 are: colony rattling still lose crunch life fits hunch scan packages grasping chains.