Does anything eat wasps ?

A victim of the recent high winds has been this wasp's nest. Originally at the top of a Field Maple, before being violently removed and repositioned closer to the ground. Interestingly the nest had been broken into whilst still at the top of the tree, no doubt by a Great spotted Woodpecker and not a Honey Buzzard on it's way south !



During the time the nest had been brought indoors to show the children, a mystery leafhopper appeared on the inside of a window. Anyone who has looked at 'hoppers' closely will know how difficult they can be to identify, often requiring examination of the genitalia to be certain, a fiddly and time consuming operation.

Fortunately this was a fairly distinctive looking specimen being narrowed down to one of three species found on Acer. As Field Maple belongs to this genus it was a  good bet that the 'hopper' came in with the nest.

A close look at the face pattern revealed it to be a female Acericerus heydenii a species first identified in the UK on the south coast in 2010, though there is always the possibility that it has been overlooked before.