Steve and Judy's Travels!

With our language, we describe where we are in relation to other things in terms of ourselves.  Something is to our left or right, in front of us or behind us.

There are indigenous societies in Australia that have no words for left or right though.  Direction is anchored to the world around them, not their own person.  They always know where they are in space.  Say “Move your bowl a little to the north”, and they will know which way to move it.  This quirk of language requires them to maintain continuous awareness of their own orientation, and it seems perfectly natural to them.  In turn, they tend to have greater personal navigation skills than those of us that use our own current position as a base for how to think of things.

It’s a little different.

Less jungly.

Coming in for a landing.

My birthday walk at Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge.

It starts at the top of this trail map, right along the southern border wall, and does a big loop between there and the Rio Grande, so my entire walk was on the other side of the fence.

We get a variety of habitat in the thorn forest.

Past the old cemetery.

The cemetery relates to a large ranch created by a land grant from the Mexican government in 1834.  It was Mexico here then.  We have a friend a little farther north who still owns family property as a result of a land grant when this was Mexico.

Later, I ran across this mesquite tree that may capture how I want to be when I grow up.

Beat up.  Twisted.  A limb blown off by lightning and even burned a little.

But still out there doing its thing.

Unless maybe I’d rather be like this squirrel.

Fat and happy.

These leaves on the ground below the firebush.

They were cut off and fell to the ground.  Leafcutter ants.  From that pile of leaves on the ground, there is a thread.  A moving thread of leaf bits being carried home by ants.

Along the front of the steps.

Across the pavers next to the shed.

To this hole in the ground, being carried down, one by one.

The ants harvest the leaves, but not for food.  They carry them underground and farm with them.  They chew them up, compost them, inoculate them with a particular fungus, tend the crop, and harvest the tidbits the fungus produces.

Leaf cutter ants invented farming 50 million years before we did!