Three slightly off-beat or, if you like, quirky, items about animal and insect life, from the February/March edition of The Countryman. In a feature in which readers' natural history queries or observations are dealt with, a Mr Derek Ive writes from Spain to remark that while foxes have for long been foraging behind his house for what they can get ("Alas that included our three bantams"), but mostly after moles and voles, this year after the meat course they have moved to the orchard and feasted on plums and apples, ripping bird netting off the plums, while apples are torn off, sometimes breaking young branches. Teethmarks are clear, and plum-stones are found in their droppings. The editor of this section, Brian Martin, replies that as well as mammal prey, British foxes take both wild and cultivated fruit and berries, also small birds, carrion, scavenged foods, insects, earthworms, beetles, crabs, etc.
Now wasps. Mrs Sheila Hayden of Sutton Coldfield was anxious when a wasp settled on her plate at lunch, "as I react badly to wasp stings. I quickly cut the insect in half with my knife, but the front half flew away and I assumed would promptly die." But two minutes later it was back, trying to land on her plate. She drove it off and it settled on the ground where she trod on it. She had heard of hens running around with their heads cut off, "but is this normal behaviour with a wasp?" Not so unusual, is the reply. The editor once saw a wasp cut a large moth in two and fly off with the abdomen, "leaving the head and thorax, with wings attached, fluttering in the grass for some minutes". As to decapitated hens, he writes that the spinal cord possesses considerable autonomy and can co-ordinate wing and leg movement for a short time after the brain is cut off.
Another wasp story. Mrs Joan Blewitt Cox from Devon writes that a wasp was being a nuisance in her room and started to make a hole in an apple. She drove it out about a dozen times, but it came back to dig into the same apple. Was it just one wasp or a series of them? So she dabbed a spot of Tippex-type white correction fluid on it while its head was in the hole it had made in the apple. Yes, the same insect came again and again. She shut the window and at dark the wasp gave up trying to get in. Next morning, the window opened, in came the Tippex wasp and made straight for the same hole in the same apple. "I could not help marvelling at its memory."