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American Red Squirrels are pretty small, only 6.5-9″ long (excluding the tail) and Eastern White Pine cones are nearly as big, up to 6″. They contain a tiny seed at the base of each scale, and the squirrels love them. They prefer to dine on a lookout, like a tree stump, large rock, or in this case thirty feet up in a white pine. This video shows the tree, the large one in the center of the frame, and zooms in on the squirrel just as it irritatingly decides to descend. (When you play the two videos in this blog, they are not as dark as they look here.)

Luckily I had been watching it earlier, taking photos from ground level far below, and you can see what a humungous cone it had unearthed from the snow:

Starting at the bottom, it removed one scale at a time, and ate the one or two seeds at the base. It carefully worked its way up the cone, one scale at a time, holding on tightly to its trophy:

When it has finished, it will leave just the central spine behind, surrounded by a litter of scales:

Below is a video of the squirrel tucking in. By now he has worked his way half-way down the cone, and he reminds me of a Frenchman eating an artichoke:

American Red Squirrels, Tamiasciurus hudsonicus, particularly like the cones of pine and spruce and they cache their food, sometimes underground, but not always. This squirrel had collected heaps of pine cones at the base of his special tree, and also beneath several others nearby.

I counted fifty at the base of this tree alone, and was rather impressed by the care with which they had been arranged, most of them neatly lined up, and largely pointing in the same direction, away from the tree. Perhaps it gives the squirrel the same satisfaction as reorganizing the sock drawer gives us on a grey day.

They also eat other nuts: this one had started in on a Red Oak acorn:

PS The scientific name Tamiasciurus comes from the Greek ταμίας “tamias”, meaning treasurer or steward, or one who collects. Apt.

My last group of nests are built of paper, which the wasps create by chewing wood fibre into pulp. So in the Three Little Pig story they are the house of wood or sticks!

Hornets and paper wasps are eusocial* insects, and live in large colonies. In Assam, I found this hornet nest, probably Vespa analis judging by the beautifully scalloped pattern of the nest; the huge nest dwarfs the hornet in the middle, and must contain a sizable colony:

The next photo is the nest of Maine’s Bald-Faced Hornet, Dolichovespula maculata, not quite as big, but still a very respectably sized abode. They can reach two feet tall, and contain up to 700 workers:

They are intricate constructions. The outer case is layer upon layer of paper, like a mille-feuille pastry.

The outer layer conceals tiers of honeycomb chambers. This disembowelled one was in a lilac bush in my garden, and its inhabitants were responsible for a nasty sting which blew up one side of my face to unattractive proportions last summer.

The nests are built freshly every year, so taking one apart during the winter in the interest of science is OK, and also safe (post-frost) because only the fertilized queen survives the winter, and she hibernates elsewhere .

The Northern Paper Wasp, Polistes fuscatus, builds a smaller nest, and the cells are exposed, like this one under the eaves of our cottage. They are not very aggressive, and you can watch them at work, from a safe distance.

The queen lays a single egg in each cell. The developing larva is fed by the workers with such delicacies as masticated caterpillars. If you look carefully, you can see the light brown larvae in two of the cells near the bottom left of the photo below, and in the cells a little higher up there is a greenish sludge that I think is caterpillar puree.

When the larva is fully developed it spins a silken cream-colored lid for its cell, beneath which it pupates. You can see one in the centre of the photo above. Soon after, a new wasp emerges from the pupa, cuts off the lid, and crawls out into the world.

* Eusocial insects show an advanced level of social organization, in which a single female or caste produces the offspring and nonreproductive individuals cooperate in caring for the young.

[Here is another post that I saved from a warmer month, to provide material to keep me going through this bleaker time of year.]

The three little pigs built their houses out of straw, sticks, or bricks. And so do wasps.

Imagine a wasp’s nest. Paper, hanging from a tree or some eaves, right? Well yes, but that is not the whole story.

These wasps build their nests of mud (bricks!):

And add to them year by year:

The stucco nests are made by the Black-and-Yellow Mud-dauber wasp, which collects little balls of mud from puddles, and carries it to its building site. The different sources of mud produce the multi-coloured effect. 

The Grass-carrying Wasp, Isodontia mexicana, builds its nest of grass (straw!):

These solitary wasps wriggle into crevices, like this one between two shingles, where they lay their eggs:

Then they carry grass in their mandibles and seal the hole up:

In this last photo you can just see an empty papery whitish carcass of a tree cricket which they stash to feed their larvae.

Next time, I’ll return to those familiar paper nests, made of masticated wood pulp (wood!), and take you into their innermost workings.

[Thursday November 26th 2020 is American Thanksgiving, and I wanted this post to arrive in time for the day, which is why it is coming so fast on the heels of my last one.]

My lockdown preparations include filling the freezer, but obviously I didn’t have to design and manufacture my own freezer. Beavers basically do. In the summer, they eat fresh green plants, but these don’t store well. However, their digestive systems allow them to eat the nutritious cambium layer of woody plants and trees, which can be stored just fine; these two photos show an oak tree recently cut by a beaver, and the cut surfaces of the tree were oozing sap on an unexpectedly warm day:

So how do they store them? The pond will be frozen soon, and it won’t thaw till the spring unless global warming intervenes. The beavers prefer not to emerge to forage on land, where they are vulnerable, so they lay down a stash of small and smallish twigs and branches, in a sort of floating raft, which they gradually weight down with larger branches. When the ice forms, this larder will be accessible from under the ice, and should keep them going through the winter months. In this photo, you can see the growing food pantry stretching off to the right of the lodge:

and a slightly closer shot here:

If you look carefully, in the right foreground there are larger branches sticking up out of the water. Their bottom ends have been rammed into the muddy bottom to help hold the cache in place. A couple of days later I took another look. They had added some larger stuff on top, to help weight it down so that their favorite foods stay sunk beneath the ice.

All of this is done at night, so all year I have not seen them at work. On November 15th this one was swimming languidly around one lodge, admiring his work (the beaver is what looks like a floating log on the right!).

A good thing too, since overnight on November 18th the whole pond froze, and in places the ice was thick enough to bear my weight. And today, November 25th, it snowed a little, transforming the perfect cone of the lodge into a miniature Mt Fuji:

Winter is here, and it is time for Thanksgiving, and to remember how lucky those of us are who have food in our freezers, and are still well and alive in this wondrous world, in this time of Covid.

PS There are actually three lodges on my pond, all fairly near each other, and all seem to be under renovation, but only two have visible food stashes. I don’t know if this is one family that has decided they’d like separate bedrooms, or if they are unrelated but willing to tolerate neighbours. You can see all three in this photo, though one is far in the distance, between the other two:

PPS The dam needs regular maintenance too, but this one is in good shape, so they haven’t done much to it this year.

Of the local ducks that breed here, the most dramatic are the Wood Ducks, Aix sponsa.  They are here from spring to fall, and I have been watching them for the whole breeding season, starting on March 28th, too far away for good photos.

They are very shy, but a pair flew in over my head on May 12th without noticing me, and settled down. The males in breeding plumage are extremely handsome, bedecked in an almost military outfit:

The females are much more discreet, but the large oval white eye marking helps to distinguish them from any other brownish duck:

This year they are breeding on my biggest beaver pond.  They nest in holes in dead trees, like this one, which I suspect is where they were breeding this year:

Once they have ducklings, they become easier to photograph, because they cannot fly off when they hear the slightest sound or catch a tiny movement. The next photo was taken on June 18th:

On July 2 all six were still there, and beginning to leave her side and venture out alone:

Still too small to fly, if startled they ran along the top of the water, desperate to get to the safety of the rushes:

By late July, I found a solitary female on a tiny secluded beaver pond; either she had raised her brood, or never had one, who knows.

Wood ducks normally have one brood a year, but occasionally they have two. This female had very young ducklings on August 4th, so it could have been her second brood:

And on August 29th I saw what I am fairly sure are two new grownups, one female (left) and one male, distinguished by their white head markings. The male does not yet have the adult’s red eye.

Welcome to the next generation.

I saw my last wood duck this year on October 18th. They are leaving for Florida, very sensible, really.

PS Next time, I will show you how the male’s plumage changes with the seasons.