Mother's hardly working naturalist

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Most books will tell you paper was invented in China about 1,900 years ago by a man named Ts'ai Lun. W Ts'ai Lun may have been t first Homo sapiens to ma paper, but wasps have bee making the stuff for eons.

Worker wasps use their powerful jaws to chew up mouthfuls of wood from dead trees, rotten fenceposts, old boards and naked house siding. As they chew, the wood fibers mix with the wasp's saliva to make pulp. Then the wasps fly back to the nest and plaster the pulp in place, spreading the material carefully with their jaws, stopping every few minutes to test the layer with their feelers to make sure it's the right thickness. As each wasp works, it pivots its body slightly. That's why paper wasp nests have hundreds of small curved lines on them. When the pulp dries it turns into paper tough enough to protect the wasps from rain and wind. It's so strong you can write or type on it. If you find an abandoned hornet nest (make sure it's empty!), tear a strip off and flatten it under a book overnight. You'll have yourself a nice little piece of wasp notepaper.

Because wasps get the wood fibers for their nests from different places, the paper is streaked with different shades of black, gray and white. Nests near old red barns sometimes are mottled red from chewed up pieces of the nest over our door has some interesting blue areas - the color of our home.

THOSE BUSY, BUSY BIRDS

Occasionally here in my horizontal observation post I am awakened - I mean surprised - by the characteristic loud buzzing of a nearby hummingbird in flight. Talk about busy. The hummer that hovers about our home does enough work for both of us, a thought I find enormously pleasing.

There's a lot of bird packed into that tiny, iridescent package. And a lot of food for wonder:

• There are 340 different kinds of hummingbirds in the world, and they all live in the Western Hemisphere. Europeans had never seen a hummingbird until a French explorer spotted one in the New World in 1558.

• The tiniest bird on Earth is the Cuban bee hummingbird. From the tip of its bill to the end of its tail, it's only about 2 inches long.

• Even an average-size hummingbird is very small. Black-chinned and ruby-throated hummingbirds, the two most common kinds in North America, are just over 3 inches long and weigh about as much as three paperclips.

• Hummingbirds are the only birds in the world that can fly not only forward but also backward. For a quick getaway a hummer can even flip over and fly upside down.

• In the time it takes you to say the word hummingbird (about one second) a hovering hummer beats its wings 55 times. When it's flying fast, its wings beat 200 times a second.

• The hummingbird's heart is the largest compared to its body size of all warm-blooded animals.

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