Vespa, the Wasp

All boys who grow up in the country, no matter what inhabited place on earth, know that one important purpose for rocks is to knock down a "wasper's" (wasp's)  nest because there is adventure there - there is danger and there is also the good feeling that he got away with it.  I sometimes wonder if there is a sign on such a nest that only boys can see that says, "throw a rock at me."

I was one such boy when no nest was safe, whether paper wasp, yellow jacket, or hornet.  I also paid the price for such entertainment on several occasions.  But sometimes I was innocent, like the time I was wading through mountain ivy bushes and bumped a hornet's nest.  When I stopped running the obligatory 50 yards, one of the hornets which, I suspect was riding on my shoulder, popped me in the ear.  It felt as though all the fires of Hell had concentrated itself in that one stinger.  In my 7th grade school picture my right ear was almost twice as large as the other, a painful reminder not to mess around with hornets.

This is a brown paper wasp, Polistes exclamans, which is very common and is found nesting under eaves and porch ceilings - really anywhere outside the house (or in the house if you let them).  There are twenty-two species of paper wasps in North America, but over 400 worldwide.

This nest has only four or five members and they are very interesting to watch.  They are in almost constant motion walking around and back and forth on the nest.  When a member flies off and returns, it is greeted by one of them, probably to determine whether it is recognized and to give the wasp password.

These wasps are not at all aggressive.  The built on an outside door frame and they tolerate my coming and going.  Wasps, although, hated and feared by many people are tremendously beneficial insects.  They kill or paralyze for their young, scores of insect pests - those which make our lives uncomfortable.  Like snakes, many people see them as something to be gotten rid of and bring out the Raid hornet and wasp spray.  I don't do that except on yellow jackets, which are very aggressive and will attack with little or no provocation. However, people who suffer anaphylactic shock reaction  when stung by wasps and bees would be best advised to avoid them altogether.

Some time back I posted a blog about my "taming" a nest of paper wasps on my back deck,  Each day, and several times a day I would approach closer and closer until they decided that I was no threat to them.  They became so used to me I could touch one without being stung, but here is the interesting part: sometimes one would deliver a very small amount of venom to say, "Don't get too familiar; we have a weapon you don't want to feel."

My contention is that all living things have intelligence, to a greater or lesser degree.  In my years of observing them I have come to the realization that insects are not stupid.  They actually learn and that means that they think.

I put some sugar water on my finger tip and they drank from it.  That doesn't mean that they understood I was being friendly or helping them, but it just could have been a source of food and I was the bearer.

In this picture I hadn't any sugar on my finger.  I just wanted to show that they didn't consider me a threat.

Eating sugar water from my finger.

Night Visitor

I was pumping gas at my local filling station when I saw something at my feet that looked unusual.  I bent down and picked it up and realized that it was a very-much-alive moth, rather large and unusual in its black and white coloration (or lack thereof).  My picture, under artificial light gave it a off white coloration, which is wrong. I should have kept it until the next day to get its correct color.

 I had seen this moth before but not in a long time and, look as I may, I couldn't find the species, so I turned to my son, Rob, who is a research specialist extraordinaire and he found it.  It is the Rustic Sphinx,  Manduca rustica, a moth native to Mexico, Central America, and the southern US.

I looked very long and hard at it to see if I could understand why the "sphinx" designation, but couldn't figure it out. 

The caterpillar is large, green, and intimidating with a tall menacing- looking horn on the hind end.  I'd hate to meet him one dark night under a street light.

"Georgie"

Robert Lawson wrote a children's book entitled, Rabbit Hill, which I read when I took a course in "kiddie lit" in college.  It is a story about a clan of rabbits who lived on a run-down farm that was sold to "new folks," and the rabbits were concerned that they might be stingy with their vegetables in the garden or that they were not nice in general, much as we all are when new neighbors arrive. 

The main character, Little Georgie, was a typical youngster who was full of energy and not full of caution,  one day ran in front of the new folk's car and was hit.  When they carried him inside,  the other rabbits feared that he had met with doom, but when Little Georgie showed up with a bandage and all fixed up, they knew the new owners were good people. If memory serves me, they also put up a sign that cautioned visitors to drive slowly because rabbits lived there.

This rabbit, whom I named Georgie,  because he reminded me of his namesake, lives under my back deck and he ventures out quite often in the back yard to see if there are delectables that might be a pleasant change from his diet of clover and weeds.

Here he is inspecting a piece of bread I tossed out to him.



It meets with his approval.

Like me, Georgie loves watermelon.

Georgie, we both love summer, so enjoy, as I will, the good things summer brings and we'll just have to muddle through the barrenness of winter. But I might find an apple or two  and share.

Cicada

I had a visitor to my back deck this afternoon, one whose raucous call demands immediate attention.  Entomologists say they make the noise with a set of tymbals at the base of the abdomen that can produce loudness up to 120 decibels, which can be irritating to the human ear.  If you have ever heard one, you will never forget it.

These cicadas are found all over the eastern United States and there are more than 1500 species of them.  I don't think this one is the 17-year cicada, Magicada septendecula,  since it doesn't have the red eyes of that species.  This is the time for them to emerge in this area, but I haven't had that wailing, pharoah, pharoah, pharoah sound males make to attract mates.  It would probably take an entomologist to positively identify the many which inhabit our woods. .

The size of this insect, about an inch and a half long is impressive, and the markings are really pretty.  When I was growing up in rural North Carolina, people called the cicada a "jar fly."  I suppose the sound is loud enough to jar someone awake if he were dozing in the afternoon sun.




Those transparent wings with the lines seem almost
drawn. I guess the most noticeable feature of the
cicada are the wide-set eyes.  The purpose would
seem to give it great binocular vision.  At first glance the wide-set eyes reminded me of the hammerhead shark.

I have heard them calling in mid-summer and the call would be broken off to a kind of desperate clicking making me think that a predator, perhaps a bird or a cicada killer, a large wasp, had captured it.

When Nature Meets Progress

When we look around at all the beauty nature has to offer, if we are keenly aware of such beauty, it almost overwhelms us.  But along with that wonderment there is another side, a darker side - the struggle to survive and sometimes the struggle is in vain. 

One such example when nature collided with "progress" is seen in this picture of this pileated woodpecker, Dryocopus pileatus, which is a bird, to me, that epitomizes wildness in the woodlands and mountains.  It is one of my favorite birds. I had the good fortune a few years back to see two mating in a white pine in my front yard, then hammering out a hole in a nearby dead tree and raising four little ones.

The old people in the North Carolina mountains called them "wood hens," because their cry, they believed, sounded hen-like when the hen cackles to call its "biddies" to found food, but I have never thought of it that way.

If you are lucky enough to hear one hammering on a dead tree, drumlike, powerful, then giving that ta ta ta ta ta ta rapid scream which resounds over hollows and across ridges, you will know that you heard that same cry that pioneers and Indians centuries ago heard - know that you share, in a sense, a kinship with them.


Unfortunately this one met "progress" and lost. It made the mistake of landing on a power line near my niece, Carolyn's house. She posed it to be lifelike - a fitting picture for its obituary.

 I am not disparaging progress because it is an inescapable force that defines us in this age.  We are part of it and cannot escape it.  It would be impossible to live without electricity and other conveniences that we have long taken for granted.

At one time when I was young I entertained the notion of casting off all the trappings of civilization and becoming one with nature, a notion many of us have entertained, but later when some of the romanticism in me had died, I realized this was impossible.  We created this monster and now we must live with it or die.  It takes no prisoners.

Is That a Stick?

As I was walking beside my pickup this morning I saw what I thought was a stick on the hood.  I casually picked it up to throw it into the grass when it moved and I saw that it wasn't a stick at all, but an insect.




I hadn't seen one of these curious insects for a couple of years and I hoped that they weren't gone from these parts.  How something living could look so dead, so slender, so wood-like is a mystery.  So good is its mimicry that it sways as a stick would with the wind blowing it.  Any bird that catches one of these walking sticks has a sharp eye, for certain.

 According to National Geographic, there are over 3,000 species of them, varying in size from a few inches to one in Borneo that is 13 inches long.  Until I read about them, I had no idea there were that many.   In my experience with them from my childhood until now, they seemed pretty much alike.

All walking sticks are herbivores and in the US they seem to prefer blackberry leaves. As far as I know they don't destroy large amounts of plant leaves. They are of the Phasmatodea order, in Greek meaning phantom or apparition - an apt name since they seem to materialize from stick to living insect.

This photo shows the head of the walking stick.

This is the tail and what appears to be pincers.  I carefully handled it and it didn't use it as a defense.  Maybe it could be an ovipositor or used when mating.  





 This is the full view of the walking stick insect.
 (Remember, click on the photo to enlarge it.)

Tragedy at the Wren's Nest

Before, I kept you posted on the baby wrens in the hanging basket.  Yesterday morning before daylight I planned to take a picture of them in their nest, but I was surprised to see it empty, since I knew they were too young to fledge.

At about the same time I notice something on the window sill near the basket.  It was a king snake.  There were three bulges in its body, which were the baby birds.

I captured the snake and put it in a half-gallon jar to study it.  Indeed, it was a king snake, about two feet long.  These are some photos I took:

I was very angry and upset that the snake had eaten the babies that I had grown close to, but when I cooled down, I realized that the king snake was just doing what its nature dictated.

This set me to thinking. We tend to anthropomorphize - assign human characteristics to animals - because we live in a society where some things are wrong and need addressing, but to the snake it was a bonanza find - three helpless babies that would satiate it for a month or more.

We humans do things that are far worse than a snake following its nature.   We take infant calves from their mothers, put them in a dark stall with no room to move about because their muscles would develop and their meat wouldn't be tender, force them to stand or lie in their excrement and feed them nothing but cow's milk, which results in scours for their entire miserable lives.

When they are mercifully killed and sent to the supermarket, where they are cut into steaks, wrapped in innocuous plastic and labeled "veal," we are distanced from its plight. We hire others to do the business of processing.  Don't get me wrong - I eat meat, but I don't eat veal because of the inhumane manner in which it is forced to spend it's short life.

My first thought was to kill the snake, thereby avenging the baby birds, but I knew that would be wrong.  No animal is "mean" by our definition, so I carried it over to some woods a good distance from my house and I let it go.  Had it been a copperhead or a rattlesnake, I'm not what I would do.