"One of the easiest natural wonders to observe is an ant hill. This
simple book, chosen for the television program, 'Reading Rainbow,'
reflects and informs a young child's curiosity about ants and their
homes. One of the charms about this book is that it shifts from close-up
views of these lively insects underground to larger scenes.."--Encounters
"Gives kids a look inside the miles of tunnels and hundreds of rooms
that harvester ants build beneath the ground.."--The Christian Science
Monitor
"This behind-the-scenes story of a deceptively simple hill should build
interest in observing both city and country ants."--The Kirkus Reviews
Like many kids, I watched ants carry grasshoppers or other insects many
times their size back to their hills. I poked at ant hills and watched
the scurrying escapees. Ants were at the same time fascinating and
pests. My relationship with ants changed over the years, as have other
relationships. The book ANT CITIES is dedicated to one of my
grandmothers. Her main interactions with ants were to step on them, set
out traps for them in the kitchen and pour boiling water on them through
cracks in the sidewalk. I don't mean my grandmother was a generally
cruel person-she was otherwise one of the kindest people I know. The
understanding and attitudes each of us had about ants changed, at least
in part, through my doing this book. I had told her my next book would
be dedicated to her and this was it, so with my grandmother's interest
in ants, that seemed somehow appropriate. She never again poured hot
water over ant colonies, at least not in front of me.
I learned more about ants as I read every book I could find for research
in the Brooklyn (where I was living at the time) Library. I found out
that there is an incredible amount one could know about these intriguing
tiny social creatures. And I found, surrounded by piles of books about
ants, that there were about as many scientific opinions about the
"facts" of ant life as there were experts in the field. I wrote letters
to experts on ants and called with questions. I discovered that science
is not a set of facts agreed on by all scientists. On any given matter,
different scientists may have different opinions of what the "facts"
are, and I would have to sort them out before I could decide which to
present in my books. In researching how ants communicate, I called one
of the foremost ant researchers. At that time she was with the Harvard
Museum of Comparative Zoology. She was, as have been most people I
contact to find out more about their fields, glad to share what she
knew.
Several days later I unexpectedly received in the mail a small box
addressed to "Doctor Dorros." Inside the box were ants. I had suddenly
become a doctor of ants. I had to tell her I was not an ant doctor nor
any kind of doctor for that matter, (though some of my relatives are). I
got to know more about the ants that she sent me as those harvester
ants, hitherto unknown in Brooklyn, soon escaped and were running around
my apartment. Whether in the city or the country there are ants--they
can make their homes in hollowed out tree branches or in miles of
tunnels underground. A flying ball of ants dropped from the sky, or at
least the second story of a house, into a neighbor's yard not long
ago--there are amazing ants almost everywhere.
