Saturday morning Sampson, Delilah and I headed back to the scene of the crime. You know, the place where Delilah tried to kill me.
The day was mild enough and I was wandering along behind the dogs, enjoying the smell of early spring on wet grass (it had rained the night before) and of course keeping my eyes sharp for challenges.
There are a LOT of dogs in and around our neighborhood on e-fences. I know where most of them are and do my best to cross the street so we are not on the same side. (It makes wrangling easier, if we are across the street from the barking dog.) Sampson and Delilah are really good about it, all I say is, cross the street and they willingly oblige.
This probably explains why I didn’t notice it right away, because the street we were on has dogs on the e-fence on both sides of the street, but only about one house apart. Yes, it WAS early, but one never knows when someone will open their door and just let the dogs out.
Who let the dogs out?
Woof, Woof, Woof, Woof.
Sorry, that song got stuck in my head for a minute. Now it’s stuck in yours. You’re welcome.
Anyway, we were just passing the second house when I looked down in the street and noticed the…worms. There were a lot of worms in that one particular spot. Then I looked around me. There were more worms and even more worms, everywhere in the street I looked, I saw worms.
See how the worm turns?
Now I’m not necessarily a screamer. I mean if I see one ant or spider crawling in the house, I calmly kill it. But if I lift up a paper and 100 ants run at me, odds on favorite, I’m going to scream.
Like a girl.
So when I looked around me and saw I was literally surrounded by worms, I had to hold back a scream. I mean, it was a war zone for worms.
It reminded me of Tremors. Except these worms weren’t that big. THANK DOG. And they weren’t popping up out of the ground swallowing things either. Phew, that’s a weight off.
You know when you have a heavy rain storm that brings down a whole bunch of twigs and debris? It looked like that.
At first I thought there must be hundreds of worms and then I looked around some more and realized there weren’t hundreds of worms, there were thousands of worms!
Oh look, it’s a worm. I wonder if you can eat them?
Sampson and Delilah could give two figs if they step on a worm or not, but I won’t knowingly step on a worm.
It’s like Twister. With worms instead of colored squares. And no, I’m not putting my hand down there.
I mean they’re SQUISHY.
Suddenly, I’m worried about where I’m putting my feet. I mean, worms are slimey, and the road is wet.
What if I slip on a worm? Or slip on a worm and fall? Then I’ll be lying in the wet road, surrounded by worms.
Why oh why couldn’t I discover the worms when I got to the end of the street? Why did I have to see them in the beginning? Now I had to walk the entire street, trying to play Dodge Ball with worms.
UGH.
I’ve never seen so many worms at one time. Nor do I ever want to again to be truthful. But it did get me wondering, just what all those worms were doing in the street. I mean, do they have a Mardi Gras for worms?
I looked for beads, nothing.
Hubby said it was because of the rain. So I googled it.
Some people believe the worms come out of the ground in a hard rain to keep themselves from drowning.
“Dr. Dennis Linden, Cindy Hale, and other worm experts say that worms do NOT surface to avoid drowning. In fact, they come to the surface during rains (especially in the spring) so they can move overland. The temporarily wet conditions give worms a chance to move safely to new places. Since worms breathe through their skin, the skin must stay wet in order for the oxygen to pass through it. After rain or during high humidity are safe times for worms to move around without dehydrating. It is true that, without oxygen, worms will suffocate. But earthworms can survive for several weeks under water, providing there is sufficient oxygen in the water to support them.” Source
I also read that sometimes if it rains hard enough, the sound of the rain hitting the ground sounds like predators such as moles, and the worms will leave the earth to flee their predator. Source.
Makes me wonder if I should get a pet mole, just to stave off the worms.
A mole? You can eat those right?
Creepy! When I was a kid and it rained I would go out and collect worms for fishing as they would all come out of hiding. I would see lots on the road too and would pick them up easily as they couldn’t get back in there hole. Now to see that many as a adult is creepy. I never knew why they were all over the road so thank you for that, and yes Delilah you can eat a mole but you might get worms.
OMD worms….. sounds like something out of a horror movie. Have a terrific Tuesday.
Best wishes Molly
Gah! Mom would’ve dropped dead from fright right then and there. …right on top of all the worms. It’s one of her fearing-est fears ever. (There was an incident when she was little. She isn’t over it.) Worms. As delicious as they sound, they are not in my future….
Love and licks,
Cupcake
Worms are seriously gross! After it rains they cover the streets and walkways and Mom can’t even look down as she knows she is squishing them. Yuck! Bailie tried to eat them when she was a tiny pup and Mom nearly had heart failure. Luckily, she gave up on eating worms fairly quickly. They are disgusting and they smell too. No worms, thank you.
Wow those are a lot of worms. We don’t normally see that many after rain, thank goodness. If you were going fishin’ you could have put them to good use.
Lol. A worm migration! This made me laugh a lot. Another disgusting thing about worms – when they die and start to dry out they smell BAD – really bad for such small things. I know this because the dogs LOVE to roll on the occasional dead smelly worm. It took me a long time to pinpoint the smell because its hard to see a dead worm in the grass…. (not hard to smell!)
Ewww. You could have gathered them and went fishing. I can just see you skewering a worm on a hook.
WE love WORMS….. esp the dried up CRUNCHY ones… Delicious… and the mangled Stinky ones are GRRRRREAT to Roll on… It really gets our mom’s juices flowing when we do THAT… BUTT then she gets the SHOWER Flowing…. and we have to have Baffs to get the “SMELLS” off.
I would have gone through life thinking that worms came out of the ground for fear of drowning in the wet soil instead of traveling to a more enjoyable part of the world. Siriusly, I love learning things like this.
Yuk! I would be paranoid about stepping on them too. Did you have to pick worm parts from Sampson and Delilah’s paws when you got back home?
I’ve seen this happen out here too – we don’t get much rain, but whenever we do there are always tons of worms around. Thanks for the explanation.
well, at least it wasn’t snakes!!LOL I bet the robins were in heaven 🙂
AAAAAAAACCCCCCKKKKK!!!!! I would have had a meltdown. You and I think a lot alike. I also would have worried about slipping on them and then landing on them and having the survivors slithering all over my face. [shudder]
This really reminds me of those made for TV movies they used to show in the late 70s, early 80s. Remember? Things like “Ants!”, “Swarm!”, and there was even one with worms – probably called something really imaginative like, “Worms!”. I will never forget when some guy fell from the stairs and landed in the huge mass of worms at the bottom. Or maybe it was another teeming mass of bugs he landed in. And what about when the ants were crawling all over those people and they had to breathe through straws? I watched them all. Probably not a good thing since as an adult, whenever I see more than one insect, I have been known to lose it and express my loss of sanity by flailing about in a wild dance, screaming, or, both.
All I can say is “EEEEWWWWWWW!!!! I hate insects, worms, anything of that sort. My hubby always says that it’s a sign the soil is good if I dig up a worm when gardening, but I’d really rather not anyway.
OMD, the horror!! I wouldn’t want to step on one either! We are supposed to get a little rain tonight (and we haven’t had any in ages) so I’ll keep my eyes peeled for worms on our walk tomorrow! Bleh!!
That used to happen to us when we lived in an area with pavement. I’d freak out because I couldn’t bear to see worms being squished by cars so I’d try to save them. But, as you pointed out, there were THOUSANDS!
Thanks for the funny story and the memory!
I can’t help it. I’m laughing at your worms because I keep seeing the scene in “Grumpier Old Men” where Max (Walter Matthau) and Maria (Sophia Loren) are out in the grass hunting worms for fish bait. Max accidentally (?) pushes Maria and she slips and falls in the grass, scaring the big worm back into its hole. From there it just gets sillier. Somehow I can’t imagine Sophia Loren with Walter Matthau. 🙂
Interesting! I didn’t know that was why they came out! and now that it just rained I do not want to go outside 😉
I don’t know if it’s true but I feel that I can “smell” worms. When I go outside after it rains I can smell if there’s worms around; I’ve often said “Oh it smells like worms” an no one seems to understand what I’m talking about. I highly suggest you avoid the movie Squirm if you’re not a big fan of worms ( though I must tell you it’s one of my all time favorite horror movies – it’s a 1970s flick about worms that gain special powers after a thunderstorm … ) Anyways yes that is a lot of worms and I always wonder if Laika even notices them because she’s never even looked at them as far as I can tell.
Sometimes worms find there way into my laundry room. Maybe they come through the dog door! By the time I find them, they are usually pretty dried out, which is good, because I can sweep them up. Otherwise, I would probably feel compelled to pick them up and throw them back outside so they don’t die.
oh, that would have grossed me out too! I know a woman who picks up the worms that end up in her driveway so she doesn’t run over them. She would have been out there for hours!