A picture from the internet of an old Scottish house on the coast, that caught my eye
Hornet's Nest ... Bald-faced Hornet (Dolichovespula maculata)
Description: The Bald-faced Hornet is a North American insect that builds a large paper nest to house the social colony. Commonly called the bald-faced hornet (or white-faced hornet), it is not a true hornet. Bald-faced hornets are more closely related to yellow jackets than they are to hornets.
These stout-bodied social wasps are black with white markings on the front of the head and the tip of the abdomen. The face in primarily white with dark eyes. Front wings of hornets and other Vespidae are folded lengthwise when at rest. The large antennae are conspicuous.
A colony of social wasps (hornets, yellowjackets and paper wasps) lasts only 1 year. Each nest is built from scratch each year and the previous year's nest can not be reused. Queens are the only members of the colony able to survive the winter. In April or May, each queen selects a suitable location, constructs a small nest and begins raising sterile daughter offspring. These workers take over the duties of enlarging and maintaining the nest, foraging for food and caring for the offspring while the queen functions only to produce more eggs.
Soon the nest seen above will disintegrate, and if the colony that made it is lucky a queen will survive and start a new nest in the coming summer
Ground Feeder
Mergansers
The first photograph is cropped (digitally enlarged) a little too much but I like the result, so it stays in -
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