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.