Mud Daubers

Whenever I would look up at the ceiling of my porch during the summer, I would see wasp nests: long, hollow cylinders made of mud, dried almost white, placed next to each other like the pipes of an organ. I never thought to question who made these nests until I read Bernd Heinrich’s Summer World: A Season of Bounty. Reading his account of dissecting the nests of the organ pipe mud dauber fascinated me.


This is how the wasps reproduce. They build their pipe-like nests with mud. The nest will be closed at the top but left open at the bottom. The female wasp will find a spider, then sting the spider in order to paralyze it but not kill it. She will take the spider up into the nest. She will stuff several more spiders into the very top of the nest before laying a single egg, then sealing off the compartment with a mud layer. The wasp will then add on to the nest, making it longer, adding more spiders, laying an egg, sealing off the compartment, and continuing. She will add more tubes next to the first and repeat the same process. The egg, when it becomes a larva, will then feed on the comatose spiders as it grows. When the larva has reached a size of about ¾ of an inch, it will spin a cocoon and remain protected inside the nest for the winter. The following summer, the adult mud dauber will emerge from its cocoon and then chew through the mud wall of the nest. Though the wasp larva specializes on spiders, the adult loses its taste for such meat and instead feeds primarily on flower nectar.

As soon as I read Heinrich’s description of the wasps, I immediately went to look on the ceiling of my porch where I had seen the nests so many times before. As I expected, there was a small nest there. While a strong urge exists to take down the nest and dissect it to see the crumpled spiders inside and the wasps growing inside their cocoons, I will leave them be. Maybe in the spring I will pay more attention and look for the female wasps carefully carrying spiders to the porch ceiling.

Coincidence

I had a good bird day today.

I saw an American Goldfinch perched on a tall stem of grass on my drive to work. (I’ve been seeing them more and more lately, most often on my drives to and from work, but occasionally one will pause on the sand near the edge of the lake where I lifeguard.) While I was sitting on the stand, across the lake a Bald Eagle—the first one I’ve seen this summer—swooped down to grab a fish out of the water, then flew to the northwest edge of the lake. I only briefly glimpsed its white head, but its white tail caught the sun’s light as it flew away. Another bird I’ve never seen before (which makes it harder for me to identify—was it a warbler? a female tanager?) landed on the sand in front of the lake before flying into a tree on the lake’s edge. (It’s even harder to identify the birds that make appearances at the lake because I’m supposed to be watching the people in the water, not the birds nearby.)

But the best was the Eastern Bluebird that I saw as soon as I arrived at the lake. I was sitting in my car, listening to my music while waiting for another guard to arrive with a key to the building. As one song was ending on my iPod shuffle, a Bluebird flew toward me and landed a few parking spaces away in the otherwise empty parking lot. The sun caught the blue in its wings; it was striking to me how blue this bird was. I’ve seen Bluebirds before, and several at the park where I work, but I had never seen one so brilliantly blue. I was contemplating this, and watching the bird as it tried to eat whatever lay in front of it, when the next song began on my shuffle. “One morning when I was riding in my old pick-up truck, a beautiful bluebird came flying down…” Of some 6,000 songs on my iPod, what are the chances that this song—one I actually did not know existed before this morning—came on, just as I was watching the very same bird? Neil Young goes on to sing about the “beautiful bluebird” and how he has “never seen that blue before.” I watched the bluebird in the parking lot for the duration of the song, marveling at the coincidence and the beauty of both the bird and the song, until it flew away, just as the song ended, as one of my coworkers arrived.


Photo from allaboutbirds.org
As I was watching the Bluebird, I remembered an ornithologist I knew while in Australia telling me that North American birds were “boring”—I assumed he meant that they were not as large and colorful as Australia’s rainforest birds. With our many drab-colored birds, I didn’t think very much about his comment. But after watching the royal-blue bird today, the bright yellow goldfinch, the olive/yellow unidentified bird, and the magnificent eagle, I wondered how he could have said such a thing. In behavior and appearance, these birds were anything but boring. They were beautiful—it was a good bird day.

Mountain Laurel Bloom

The morning is overcast, but
the forest is wet and glistening
with rain and dew and mountain laurel bloom.
The path is lit with grass.
Petals of the tulip tree fall to the ground,
turn brown with decay,
and blend with last year’s leaf litter.

We follow the mountain laurel bloom,
marshmallow clusters
and pink buds.
The cups of the flowers
hold dew and raspberry tint and food for bees.
The flowers fill the forest,
dense shrubs between the roots of trees.

We walk with the roar of the creek
and the sassafrass and the ferns
and the mountain laurel bloom.
The water falls, cold,
over step-like rock slabs,
and pools collect, give home, to
thick algae and water weeds.

Moss slickens the rocks. We sit,
making wet the seats of our jeans,
and watch the water
and breathe the mountain laurel bloom.
It makes the forest: glistening,
grass-lit, fern-felt,
and blossoming.

Blackbirds on the Beach

Today is the last day of my week-long family vacation at the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I brought a couple of books that I thought would be fitting for my environment, among them Song for the Blue Ocean by Carl Safina and The Wind Birds by Peter Matthiessen. I was particularly excited for the latter, thinking that I would be reading Matthiessen’s book on the shorebirds of North America while watching sandpipers peck at the sand and plovers fly overhead. No such luck. Aside from a few gulls (and really, there were only 3 or 4 at any given time…a beach trip surprisingly lacking in something that is so commonly seen!), all I saw were some Boat-tailed Grackles.



What were these blackbirds doing here, filling the niche where I thought I would find sandpipers? They walked along the beach, poking their beaks in the sand, as unafraid of the incoming waves as any ocean bird. In fact, this bird is found exclusively on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, and they are so adapted to a water environment that babies that fall into the water can actually swim, using their wings like flippers. Usually found in freshwater or salt marshes near the coast, I suppose it is not surprising that the birds would be found on the beach as well. Omnivorous birds who will eat garbage and are found in cities, it is also not surprising that they would be found in an area that is becoming increasingly more developed, as beach front properties support larger and larger houses and vacationers return year after year, never neglecting this beautiful place.



I’ve watched the grackles for days now. Other than the occasional dolphin or sea gull, and a few lines of pelicans coasting above the water, they’re the only wildlife I’ve seen on the beach this week. Several keep flying out from beneath the Kitty Hawk pier, a hundred yards south of our house, where they must have built their nests. Others walk back and forth along the beach, spreading out their large tails as they take flight to avoid the large waves that roll into shore. I can’t recall ever seeing blackbirds like these so close to the ocean, and a part of me misses the mottled, beachy plumage of the shorebirds that Matthiessen writes about, but the presence of the Boat-tailed Grackle has given me the chance to learn about a new species. Their deep black plumage compliments the skate egg cases that lie strewn across the beach, and their call is one of spring, of sunshine and good weather. Like the ocean itself, the beach is full of surprises.

New Purpose

I began this blog as a way to begin writing on my senior thesis. I wrote about why I chose to write about birds, the three main texts I was planning to use, and a little bit about the bird imagery in Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I didn’t write very much more, because I started writing my actual thesis, which ended up being nearly 100 pages and earning me departmental honors in Environmental Studies and the Palamountain Prose Award. I had plans to continue working on it, but as Robert Burns said, “The best laid schemes of mice and men / Go often askew.” So I never added to the pages of my thesis, though I continued reading about birds. And now I will continue writing about birds, and other things, but for a different purpose. I am reinstating this blog so that I may continue writing. Specifically, I am going to work on my nature writing in this blog. As passionate about environmental literature as ever, and with a reading list including authors such as John Muir, Annie Dillard, John McPhee, David Quammen, Bill McKibben, and others, it’s time to become more serious about my own nature writing. I figure the best way to begin is by writing short entries about my daily observations in nature. And because I think it is fitting, I will begin with birds.