Endeavoring to get some pictures, yesterday, of the Ruby Throated Hummingbirds in flight, I sat in our front room, with camera at the ready. There was already quite a bit of action at their feeder from an unwanted column of marauding wasps! Fortunately, they only tended to use one of the four available access holes. Not that that could have been much consolation to the poor bird, who had to put her tongue down one of them to drink! She persevered though, and wouldn’t be put off, coming back time and time again to get some of the sugar water too, brave little girl that she is.
A couple of days previously, I had rigged up a yellow “wasp-catching sugar container trap”, the Hummingbird one being pinky red. I did this in the dark whilst the wasps were away (I was thinking!). It wasn’t until the next day, when I saw the wasps still going to the reddish one, that I again got to thinking, (that’s twice in two days now), why are they not going to the yellow one? Well, this here “genius” concluded that the worker wasps, who used the reddish one, went back to the nest/hive and spread the word to go to the reddish one, not the yellow one. Whereas the users of the yellow one never actually got to fly back to the nest/hive to tell anyone that there was another sugar supply available, they were trapped! This line of wasp communication was definitely dead, but must be a positive indication that such communication between them exists. Think about it!
Whilst I was concentrating on the feeding antics of the Hummingbird as it avoided the wasps, another bird visited one of my other hanging Birdie Block feeders. A flash of blue and red caught my eye, and there before me was a Red-breasted Nuthatch. Wow! I hadn’t seen one for quite a while, but its relative, the White-breasted Nuthatch, is a fairly regular visitor. Of course I had to get a picture of it, but they never keep still! I, therefore, just had to point and shoot before it was gone just as quickly as it had arrived! Looking at my picture of the Red-breasted variety, as opposed to the White-breasted one, I was drawn to its other major identification feature, that of the eye bar. The White-breasted one doesn’t have one, but the Red-breasted one does, something else for me to remember!
Stay safe and well,
Cheers,
John Baldwin
