• Animal Tracks •

No bird song yet but I expect one will start soon. Of course as the days are getting noticeably shorter the animal activity is shifting as regards our clock. It is difficult to follow a man made clock on the farm when everyone else [the animal kingdom that is] is on natures clock. To a great extent I ignore the clock on the wall with the exception of people related activities.

Probably the most notable event this past week was a visit from my neighbor Bill. I was banging in posts [a kind of purgatory by now] and Bill came walking down the lane with a cup. I thought that he might be coming to offer me a beer but instead he had captured a huge hornet. Bill explained that he was working around a stone wall and he saw this hornet struggling to fly with a cicada. Now if you know how big a cicada is you can imagine what a scene it would be to see a hornet big enough to fly with one in tow. Bill, ever resourceful, grabbed his son's light saber [plastic is forever] and tried to fend off the hornet as it buzzed along. Explaining that once he started he realized he was fully committed Bill vanquished the hornet with the trusty light saber and then decided to see if I had any idea what it might be. I had encountered a very similar hornet a few years back that when I tried to find a name was told it was a Russian Hornet. I'm not sure about the scientific name because I couldn't find any references or images. My experience was working in the shop one evening I saw this B-52 looking insect under the light so I casually grabbed it and stuck it in a jar. I supposed that nothing that size could have a stinger. Well when I squeezed it and poked it a bit it shot out a 1/4 inch long stinger that looked like a sewing machine needle. Fortunately for me a painless lesson. Well, I explained all this to Bill, who took his trophy back home with plans of keeping it in a safe place. They sure are beautiful up close. Bill's was about the size of the first two joints of my pinky finger, black with yellow stripes, not particularly hairy and looking like it was all business yet no match for the trusty light saber.

[This just in from Matt Hand who corrected my with a positive ID of the 'Cicada-Killer-Wasp" and a citation at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada_killer_wasp (cut and paste).]

Ignore that first sentance, last night a pair of coyotes got the cows stirred up and if the ground doesn't lie the tracks show at least two confrontations before the coyotes left and the cows this morning were in a secure spot under a grove of pines. Never a dull moment.

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