Gnat Night

I have looked back through past posts and I cannot find if I have described the event I'm about to describe. Susan and I both experienced this event last year. It seems like it happens on one particular night, which happened to be tonight...for this year.

The event is the amassing of the gnats.

Here is a picture looking west from our front porch. If you were to zoom in on that large tree, you would see what appears to be a bunch of dots all over. Those dots are bugs...I am calling them gnats, but I am not sure about that.

This picture is a zoom in of the tree and a better depiction of the dots/bugs/gnats. I think you can see them a little better.

We noticed this conflagration last year and were mesmerized by it.

As the sun was setting, it lit up the area in front of this tree to reveal thousands of bugs swarming. Every once and a while, a small tornado of bugs would swirl into a tight ball and move through the swarm until it dissipated.

I tried to get a video of the tornadoes and I think I could have captured it. However, my lack of knowledge about how this camera works turns against me.

My problem might have been that all my batteries were nearly dead and I just didn't have enough power to record the video.

In any event, I have now recorded Gnat Night for 2016. We shall see if it recurs this year or if we have to wait another year.