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up what scurried away. Sure enough, not all the aspirators were
working. Somewhere someone yelled, “Help, I think I swallowed
an ant!”
other words, is big and old enough to have some secrets. As we
climbed up the trails, we could see children down below us
playing baseball to our east and to the west we saw the Hudson. I
was beginning to feel more at home. I started turning logs.
For me, and I suspect many biologists, turning logs is therapy.
Turn a log and you reveal a new world. Tunnels lead from under
logs into another universe of smaller life forms. You never know
what is beneath a log or rock until you turn it. Sometimes a
salamander, other times a snake, nearly always an ant, pill bug
(AKA woodlice, rolly pollies and isopods) or other small,
mysterious form. As I began to turn over logs and rocks in the
park, I nearly forgot I was in Manhattan.
Inwood Hill Park is big enough to have secrets. It is where I would
go to avoid detection if I were a coyote or a rare ant species. It is
where bald eagles were recently released as part of a
reintroduction project and where some of the largest trees in the
city can be found. The biggest trees, some of them hundreds of
years old, cast shade over an understory of trails, shrubs and a
great density of human history. The Lenape, the Native Americans
who lived in Manhattan when Europeans arrived, built
encampments where the park now stands. Inwood’s forest, in
What I saw first were the worms. Worms were everywhere—
wriggling worms, dead worms, great piles of worm castings and
poop. But there weren’t just worms, there were also tokens of city
life—cigarette butts, bits and pieces of ritual paraphernalia, a pink
feather, an elastic waist band—and then, beneath the third log I
turned, ants.
The first ants I saw were citronella ants of the species Lasius
claviger, a shepherd ant. They carry scale insects and aphids
from one root to another. They kill some of these cattle to feed
their babies, but most are tended to with what passes for care
until they can be milked for their sweet honeydew. Just why these
ants produce and smell like citronella remains a mystery. Also a
mystery is where their queens hide. Although citronella ants can
v