Sudbury Valley TrusteesConservation, Collaboration, and Community since 1953

The New York Times reports that Concord’s famous field guide author David Sibley spent ten days in Arkansas searching for ivory-billed woodpeckers, but did not find one. I looked for them, too, years ago, in the Big Thicket of east Texas, with much worse credentials but the same result. I suppose everyone has made a journey in the hopes of seeing a spectacular, seldom-seen creature and returned home disappointed. But sometimes nature comes to you. Last week it visited my deck.
An insect caught my attention as it landed on a houseplant about a foot from my shoulder. As it went to work, I shifted my position to look more closely.

It was a dark, medium-sized wasp, perched over the rudiments of a little clay cup attached to the plant stem. Under her mid-section she held a drop of mud that matched the cup except that it looked wetter. With her hind feet she fed that mud forward to her jaws and forelegs, with which she added it to the dried mud already in place. Before my eyes this insect was making a tiny clay vessel.
As soon as she finished applying the drop of fresh material, the wasp departed. She went back to her clay mine and I left for work. By day’s end she had completed a squat, handle-less urn about three-eights of an inch wide.

This creature turned out to have a very appropriate name: potter wasp. The pot shelters a single egg, plus all the food needed for the emerging larva to grow into an adult wasp. Although adults eat only flower nectar, they must stock their pots with some rich source of protein. Caterpillars do nicely. The mother wasp hunts them, applies a sting that leaves the caterpillar just alive enough to stave off decomposition, and deposits it in her pot. When the pantry is stocked, she plugs the open neck with mud and flies away to create another such nest chamber.

When the vessel on my deck was sealed, I was torn between letting nature take its course and investigating the interior of the little jar. Before I made up my mind, it disappeared! Bird droppings on a nearby chair suggested that, instead of providing the building blocks of a future wasp the imprisoned caterpillars were upgraded to vertebrate food. All the same to them, I suppose.

Wasps are born with a survival kit of tools (their sting!) and know-how (where to look for caterpillars; how to make an urn). It’s amazing that so many abilities can be packed into such a small animal, and a pleasure to watch them unfold in my backyard. Because of the premium we place on size and rarity it would probably be more newsworthy if an ivory-billed came pecking at the door. But humble little beasts also reward my nature curiosity, and are more likely to present themselves, if I take the time to look.