Organ Pipes

If you look for it, there’s ample evidence of Organ-pipe Mud-dauber/Trypoxylon politum activity.

The female wasps build these long chambered tubes, stuffing them with spider prey for their young. Most are vertical, but there re some horizontal ones, too. They sometimes follow the topography of the terrain, as it were.

I am assuming these entire ones are new this year.

All the examples above are from Prospect. Green-Wood has many of these, mostly in nooks and crannies of mausoleums. But the G-W ones are all old, that is, broken up or pierced with circular exit holes. I haven’t found any that look new this year in Green-Wood. The actual wasps are elusive, too: of 90 observations of the species in NYC, the vast majority are of these nests. Only about a dozen are of the wasps themselves. I’ve only seen one of the living wasps once or twice.