Sometimes a wildlife garden can include an element that was not intended for wildlife- but something manages to find a use for it anyway.
Take the wood fence in my side yard. My neighbor put it up a few years ago and I’ve noticed that wasps like to rest on it- at least that’s what I thought they were doing. Check out the video below…
See all of the tracks on the fence? The Bald-faced Hornet is eating it! Or at least that’s what I thought it was doing until I opened up my copy of Insects of the Pacific Northwest by Peter and Judy Haggard. I guess it is sort of eating my fence, but not as food. It’s chewing it up to make pulp with which the hornets make their nest.
That was last summer. I never noticed a big hornet’s nest anywhere, so I didn’t think much of it. That is, until fall came and the local trees started to lose their leaves. A few weeks ago I noticed something large sitting in a maple tree in the park down the street from our house.
The photo above shows the tree (which is heavily pruned by the power company, but that’s a story for another day). Below is what I saw.
That is one big hornet’s nest! I can’t be sure, of course, that the hornets in my backyard are spitting up my fence in this tree to make a nest, but it certainly is possible. It isn’t too far away.
By now the insects are all gone. Most of them are dead. The exceptions are the fertilized queens who are hiding somewhere under cover, waiting for next spring to start building a new nest somewhere. This nest will start to fall apart during the winter. In fact, after a recent episode of high winds, it did split up.
Now that is super cool! This gives us a sense of how many hornets must have been living in and tending to this nest. The whole thing was about the size of a soccer ball before it broke apart. There were a few scraps on the ground below, and the outer shell seemed to be made of lots of different materials. I like to think that my fence is among them.
This makes me think about how easy it is for our activities to influence wildlife. I’m sure if my fence was not there these hornets would have found a suitable material elsewhere. But the bottom line is that my and my neighbor’s actions have influenced an ecosystem around us. In this case, it was unintentional. But when I leave out some standing water with mud in my rain garden, I know that Mud Daubers are going to appear and, much like the hornets, scoop up materials I am providing and in turn make a nest out of them.
My fence has a lot more wood to supply many, many years worth of hornet nests. I’ll be sure to leave it up for them.
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