"Strong winds across Indiana and Illinois whipped a fresh layer of snow into balls some as big as hay bales that most folks had never seen the likes of.
Lenora Dodd, who lives about 30 miles south of Indianapolis, did a double take when she looked out her bathroom window Wednesday and saw a snowball roll up by itself. Later, she and a neighbor went outside to inspect the thing."
Way cool! I once saw a spring-peeper invasion in Texas that just blew my mind. Millions of the little hoppers everywhere. You’d slide on the road because you were driving on a layer of guts.
Same thing with a ladybug invasion. The sky was tinted orange! I was picking them out of my son’s eyelashes.
Have you ever witnessed anything that defied imagination?
Our semi-annual invasion of love bugs can get quite crazy at times.
I remember the first year I moved here, it scared me to death. I didn’t know what these things were, and here there were millions of the little suckers everywhere!
It’s not always that bad, but some years you can’t walk outside without getting a handful in your hair, on your clothes, and not to mention the lovely splatter on your windshield and grill.
Most of the lakes up on the North Slope are rectangular. It’s from the wind pushing the frozen tops against the far side. Also, a lot of the permafrost has widespread heave polygons on the surface, making it look a little like a honeycomb. That and the lakes make for a strange combination.
I immediately thought of a south Georgia road trip through a love bug plague as well. We’d have to stop every 20 miles or so to clean the windshield and refill the wiper-fluid reservoir. At first it was disgusting, but after we got used to it, it became nauseating.
On the shores of Lake Erie, we have swarms of mayflies. I went to Blockbuster once after dark only to find that the well-lit picture windows at the shop were completely darkened by a curtain of mayflies attracted to the light! We did without movies that night.
Incidentally, my grandma and uncle’s farm was in the middle of the freak snowball area. They sent us pictures of the hundreds of snow rolls in their fields. They don’t look so much like snowballs as they do strips of sod about to be laid in a lawn. Except made of snow, of course.
Once, when I was about eight or so, around Louisville the local cicada populations’ cycles all apparently coincided. There were thousands of the things all over the place; the noise was deafening. Then they all shed their outer exoskeleton and everywhere you’d step it was crunch, crunch, crunch. The sidewalks were paved with ghostly cicada shells. Kind of creepy for a kid who didn’t much care for bugs anyway.
Tarantulas everywhere-- really! One year there were herds (?) of them all over the place, out in the desert where we lived. It was very sad to run over them as we drove to school, since they were quite nifty little guys. The one we kept lived nearly three years and seemed to enjoy crawling around on our heads.
There’s a TV show I see sometimes, about the crab migration on Christmas Island. Crabs getting squished in the road, crabs getting into peoples’ houses, crabs all over the place. It’s pretty funny.
I agree with the Cicada noise. Here, when they emerge, you can be driving on the interstates at 70 mph and still hear the things as you go by a stand of trees with them in it. The noise is truly deafening.
I live in a woodsy area and in late spring there are always a few inchworms around but three years ago they took over the neighborhood. While they were “stringing” I couldn’t walk the 10 feet from the back door to the garage without getting a bunch on my clothes or in my hair. Icky little caterpillars and string all over the house & garage. Then they finished stringing and started chewing. I had 3-4 trees in my yard that were completely defoliated. I could literally hear them chewing. Couldn’t hang laundry on the line, first because of the strings and then because of the caterpillar poop. The back sidewalk was covered with teeny pebbles of caterpillar poop. Yuck. It did cut down on the leaf raking that fall though.
During a road trip through Oregon when I was a kid, my family and I stopped in a town called LaPine to meet some distant cousin of my mother’s.
Everywhere we went, there were 3-4 inch moths. Our car crunched over them on the road: they were defolliating the local forests. My mother’s cousin explained that they had a breeding cycle of two years. When they laid their eggs every other year, the town’s residents went hunting for the eggs and destroyed them. Needless to say, they never got them all.
Anyway, La Pine had a lot of chipmunks. And these chipmunks were being pushed out of the ecosystem by the moths, who were destroying the woodlands. So, the chipmunks went carnivorous. They began to hunt the moths.
I could never have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Do you have any idea how disturbing it is to see little Alvin stalk a 4-inch moth, grab it by the wings, bend the wings and bite off the head? Any illusions I had about a Bambi/Disney version of Nature were crushed in that moment.
On my 12th birthday, we were hanging out on the patio and this huge flock of birds flew overhead. Not that big a deal in itself, sure. But the flyover went on for at least 15 or 20 minutes! And it wasn’t birds circling around and coming back, at least not that we could tell at the time. FTR, my birthday’s in mid-August.
Hundreds and hundreds of them, and I seem to remember this happening twice, the second time maybe a year later. In retrospect I can see where they might have been making a very wide circle, out of our line of sight, but either way it was impressive and a bit creepy. And I remember my parents being as fascinated as I was. We went from “Hey, birds” to “Wow, that’s an awful lot of birds,” to staring nervously at the winged mass and wondering if Hitchcock was right.
Ginger At the very bottom of the page, there’s a form-link thing so you can jump to a date to get the archived stroies from a few days ago. I typed in 02/13/2003 – found the stroy, but no pictures I wanna see pictures!!!
When I was like 5 or so, a HUGE flock of small black birds (not sure what kind) stopped off in my neighborhood to rest whilw migrating. There were hundreds of them. It was like something out of The Birds. I remember all the local birds and squirells being afraid of them, as well as people. They were there for a few hours, then they all took off and flew away. They never returned again.
Right you are fitzig. Esvee, in Alaska the rectangular lakes extend south of the Arctic Ocean to the Brooks Range. I’m sure there are other places with the same phenomenon but that’s the one place I’ve observed them.
Something else unusual there is that we landed a helicopter on the frozen ice of the Arctic and there were little pools of water on top that were fresh instead of frozen. It’s all frozen ocean but apparently the salt precipitates out over time. Unfortunately, it’s a great place to acquire giardia.
I wanna see pictures!!!