Today in nature I saw that baseball stadium concessions really aren’t a good diet for pigeons. I, unfortunately, saw this way too up close and personally. The friend I was at the game with saw it even more up close.
Deer, deer, deer…
There has been a fly hatch recently of tiny annoying creatures that like to land on people. They’ve been congregating on the deck, barely visible, and we have taken to using this weapon to deal with the little bastards.
Anyway, back to nature. I noticed among the flies have been a couple of bald faced hornets iirc, buzzing about. Didn’t pay any attention to them until I noticed that they were hunting the flies and gobbling them down on the spot.
It was fascinating! Couldn’t be sure st first it happened so fast but I put down the weapon and let the few hornets feast on the flies. Wish I could see it in slow motion.
A friend of mine has a nest of white-faced hornets just outside his garage door. It looks almost like a security camera. They, also, are apparently beneficial, hunting down other insects, and they apparently learn to recognize the humans and other large animals that they see often and that don’t bother them.
More urban wildlife stories and, oddly, another sports stadium concession stall related one.(two in six posts - how weird is that?)
Here’s a report in the Guardian concerning a day-night cricket match last evening, and an unexpected special guest - a fox. We presume that it makes its living scrounging out of concession stall waste bins, and on this particular evening something spooked it. It ran off, but with a poor choice of direction, and ran straight onto the pitch, holding up play as it ran a lap of the pitch in front of 26 000 spectators and then disappeared out of the gate it had appeared from.
Most interesting thing that happened all evening. I know, because I was there.
Just on the off-chance that it works (not hopeful) here’s a video:
j
Not here, alas; it’s location-locked.
Try this
It’s a spectator’s cell phone video, so it’s not great quality, but you get the idea.
j
Oh, poor baby.
That was extremely well not played by both teams!
That almost looks like the fox was showing off, like he wanted to make sure that all of his fans got a chance to see him.
When this started growing in our side yard years ago, I was a bit alarmed. I thought I wanted it gone but didn’t want to call in pesticides or flame throwers so I ended up looking for someone who collected the nests. Instead I found an expert at MSU, who would’ve come out to retrieve the nest and its bugs for venom research iirc. But we were too far away. But I learned a lot from him and decided to let the nest be. I alerted the neighbor who skipped mowing around it.
We were never bothered or stung and after the nest was vacated it became a food source and nesting spot for birds. Since that time I’ve hosted/allowed these nests to form in and around my property. Never an issue. But we take precautions with lawn equipment to never bug them, live and let live.
Bald faced hornets
I saw a “dogfight” between a hawk and a crow. The crow started it, almost as if it thought other crows would mob the hawk. Instead, it was on its own.
Yes, I had one of these right under my back deck next to my door on the top side and they never bothered me one bit. I could actually hear and feel the humming from the nest, but they rarely ventured to the top of the deck.
I watched a racoon feed on the nest in late fall on frosty night in October and they have never been back.
It’s my understanding the workers in the nest die back in the fall, the queen abandons the nest never to return to it and hibernates over winter. Just the presence of the nest supposedly repels other predatory stingers from establishing in the same area.
Skunks once dug out and ate a ground nest of yellowjackets in my yard. Then the skunks moved in the under my deck. While I don’t really mind skunk odor, that was a little too much too near. But they didn’t stay long.
A blue wasp! I’ve never seen a blue wasp before. Someone said that it’s probably a “mutant”. Is that possible, or has he watched too many horror movies? LOL
Mutant really just means “genetic abnormality” so … sure.
There are blue lobsters, after all - rare as hell, but they exist.
Some Mud Daubers are blue:
Speaking of wasps and hornets, I opened the front door this morning to go for a walk and there was this giant black wasp-shaped thing, probably about the size of a large cicada, flying around in circles on the porch. It was moving too fast for me to get a good look at, but there was no way I was going to open the storm door and go out while it was out there. One of the cats saw it and was trying to jump and bat at it from the other side of the glass. After about a minute the wasp-thing finally got bored and flew away and I was able to safely head out on my walk.
That might not be a coincidence:
Pretty sure it was not a cicada killer wasp, although we did have some of those nesting somewhere near our front walkway about 10 years ago. I remember once seeing one of those with a cicada in its grip drop from the pinoak in our front yard in a controlled descent down to the ground. It couldn’t fly but it could glide. It was pretty amazing to watch.