Dr. Seuss had it right... though I believe he actually wrote "Oh the places you will go". I was sitting out in my yard trying to soak up the sunlight and reading the paper (garden section) and wondering why the cold-front was 6 hours too early. Then a... 'flying ant' landed on the page and I thumped it off. Then two more landed and I brushed them off as well and looked up... I was in the middle of a cloud of these 'flying ants'.

As I watched them, I noted that while they flitted from side to side and up and down, they were definitely just kind of riding along with the wind as it blew eastward. I then backtracked this cloud of winged insects and noticed that they were coming up from under a group of live oaks behind my house. I couldn't get really close to where they were coming from as a 6' fence separates my yard from land that these oaks were on. But watching this area I got a mental image of the rooftops of London in Mary Poppins, dozens of chimneys billowing forth streams of these bugs that then came together into one cloud. After about 30 minutes of this, the bugs were mostly gone, carried away by the winds. There are still a few late stragglers flitting up and away from time to time, but the main 'swarm' is gone.

While I call them 'flying ants' I don't believe that they really are ants. Their heads kind or resemble an ant's head, but the body is more slender. The wings are about twice the length of the body and the entire length of the bugs is no more than 3 or 4 centimeters. Anyone fancy a guess as to what I witnessed today? I'm guessing it was a hatching of some sort, but really I'm a bit clueless and mystified.