Some interesting guests in my house!!

Here comes a different journey. A journey through some of the interesting guests who happened to visit my house, with their activities caught live on my cam.

It was bright Saturday morning. The sun shining brightly and the mood was generally lethargic thanks to the holiday. I was about to begin a small walk around my house when something struck on my eyes. It was the anthorium plant and the leaf was kind of having a big coating around it. At first I thought it must be the flower, but on a closer look found out that it is made of soil.

Looked like tha handiwork of ants, but ants generally don't create such delicately balanced home hanging down from a leaf. I decided to wait with my camera to see if the house owner comes out any time. There were no visible holes in the structure anywhere too.

The wait lasted about 15 minutes when a beautiful miniscule helicopter began to circle the area. This red flying object soon landed in an area close to where I found the mud home.

It was a beautiful dragon fly. The color combo was something which we don't usually come across. I sat patiently to find out whether it is his home sweet home. The shape of this creature would have surely influenced the design of helicopters. In a flash the fly jumped to a branch closer to the muddy house.

This surely has to be one of the fastest insects around unlike its artificial counterpart - the helicopter. A close up view resembles an alien and all those wild aliens in the English fiction movies began to flash through my mind. Before I could shoot, this dragonfly caught hold of another flying insect all in one motion and came to a stand still above a wall. Now I got some time to zoom up to see where it is holding its prey. Look closely and you can see this alien look like with big balloon eyes holding its prey in its mouth.

The next moment it was gone. So he is not the owner of this home.

Meanwhile the some activity was going on in the muddy dwelling. The beautiful dragon fly had distracted my attention completely.

Another beautiful little creature with contrasting color patterns had already occupied the place and was busy doing some work in moulding its home.

It was a beautiful wasp constructing its muddy dwelling, most probably around its own on eggs.

After about 3 minutes work this guy left the place and returned in another 2 or 4 minutes with more mud. The activity was repeating again and again. Once it keeps the mud over the home, it will completely make it in the form of a paste and then mould it. The effort of this one man army was truly laudable

This seems to be of the solitary type as the whole construction was being done by a single person. I don't know whether it is venomous or not. Still it being a single person activity I left it alone. The home remained till this year's monsoon during which time it was destroyed.

If this encounter was with a solitary wasp soon an oppurtunity was obtained to get upclose with social wasps. One fine morning when me and my daughter was starting to go to school my daughter yelled at me that there is a coconut hanging in front of our house. Since I was already late, I did not listen to what she said as I thought she was referring the hanging clay pot with a face drawn over it, something which was hung by us at the time of house construction 6 years back, a part of some superstitious belief. But in the evening when I returned home I paid a casual look to the top of the house only to find that a coconut like object hanging from the wooden trelis under the slopping roof.

Next day morning I checked it closely.

A closer look and I could guess that it is another home and the creator was sitting on top of it - A giant wasp.

This structure resemebled that of a face with one eye and seemed to be a creation of the social wasps. A series of shootings at different times of day yielded some interesting results.

There was a hole in the centre of the construction which is used as the permanent door for exit/entry. In other areas they were making holes occasionally. See this image.

Two holes are newly made, one hole looks like the right eye and another one exactly at the position of mouth. Once these holes are made the creatures covers it with another layer of mud immediately. But the covering bulges out a little more, there by expanding its inner space.

In the afternoon I could see that both holes are covered

The moment I showed these objects to my parents, they were immediately asking me to remove this as the wasp is venomous and this big a nest can hold a huge number of them. If they attacked us or kids, it will be really dangerous.

This wasp seem to be a huge one two. See some of them stationed outside the nest.

Soon one bottle of insect killing spray was made use of which made all the wasps fly away and it was really painful to see there hard built home coming down in pieces. The structure seems to be made out of paper pulp. Wonder from where they gets raw material to make this. The structure was strong but very weight less. From inside a there was a huge collection of hatched eggs coming out of its shel in a honey comb like structure.

Did not feel like destroying this one. So carried it to a nearby farm and left it there. This construction was the synonym of team work and innovation to make the house bigger without affecting the inner shell in parts. Neverthless only the fittest can survive and again man won.

If till now all the visitors could be categorized as miniscule flying creatures, the next one was really scary.

There are some kittens in the neighbourhood area who generally flies off whenever they see me. One evening when returned home from office one of the kittens was crying hard and trying to grab my attention. I was wondering at the strange behaviour and went inside. Soon I could hear our baby sitter crying out aloud to come outside the house as a cat was playing with something which looked like a snake. The visibility was poor as it was getting darker.

It was indeed a snake and all of us were frightened. We tried to scare the animal away but to no avail. We even thought of calling "Vava Suresh" a popular figure in Thiruvananthapuram city who does service to catch snakes live and hand it over to forest department.

I made use of my cam to get a shot of the snake to have a closer view. 

I don't know what type of snake it is, but the photo clearly showed that the snake is fatally injured at its neck, possibly by the cat's attack. Soon I garnered some courage to lift it using a stick and found that it is motionless.   

All these visitors had there own charm. It was a real life lesson on benifits of hardwork and team work. More such visitors will be updated in this blog.

For a more detailed description on wasps visit  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp