Your Year, My Year

Today, a new form of wild life. Well, not new to the world or even to the Northwest; just new to my writing about wildlife.

Our log house features wasps. One of the many things about log houses is that in between the logs where they are parallel to one another and in the places where the logs meet perpendicular to one another and around the windows where there is trim across the logs, there are little insets, little hidden places, little dark areas where wasps can make small nests. Some kinds of wasps are willing to make small nests even though they are also capable of making large nests. They make a lot of them—I think the makers are yellow jacket wasps--in these little nooks and crannies of the log house.

They don’t pay much attention to people even though we are around the house all the time, around the logs all the time. They are going about their business much as the deer, the bear, the raccoons, etc., are and as long as we are not interfering with them, they do not find us of much interest. This is hard to believe, I know, because what conceivably could be of more interest than people? Hard to know, but in the world of wasps, people are not priority number one or even interest factor number one.

So, it is more of live and let live, life in cooperation. A few years ago, this folie de deux sort of fell apart when we had to have the logs refinished, which involved, in part, our washing off each individual log by hand. This genuinely required interfering with the wasps. We wore long gloves and long-sleeved shirts, we worked quickly and in the cool of the late, late day or early morning since the wasps were more around during the mid-day. I don’t know what else they were doing; maybe they had a big nest somewhere in the bush that they had to attend to. And we didn’t get bit very much and it hurt quite a lot only at first. And we got through with that project and we settled back into our old relationships.

In addition to wasps in the logs on the front deck of the log house, we have a barbeque on the front deck of the log house. It is fueled by natural gas so there isn’t smoke to disturb them. They don’t mind it and we don’t use it very often, anyway. Last week, as the summer season was setting in, Ed was looking to clean up the barbecue from its winter travails (it doesn’t have a plastic cover on it because it has a metal cover on it). And as he approached it, he noticed an odd thing. A wasp was going into a vent; and then a wasp was coming out of a vent; and then it became apparent that the wasps had built themselves a large nest inside the barbeque.

We are now thinking about this. Maybe we can do without a barbeque this year? This year, theirs; next year, we put a better cover on it and its ours. Or, what?