#@ the squirrels on campus: where do y'all get the audacity

[essektheylyss]

I might be wine drunk right now bit how chill you are with wasps even though one is bugging (hehe) you and you have been stung before just seems so good to me!! Like I donot know you but I feel proud thst you care enough about a wasp to stay kind! I always freak out cause I was stung omce and now these critters scare me but, I'm trying, and I think I wanna be able to act like you. Around wasps. Very positieve sweet post, thanks :) Just wanted to say, I like your attitude about them little yellow bugs :) (I checked for spelling errors but there might still be many, sorry)

Haha I'm glad it was appreciated! I don't know when I became really chill around critters, but I did realize recently that I have become that person who's like "Ugh it would be so much simpler to just kill this bug in my house because it's in an inconvenient place, but no, I feel morally obligated to catch it and let it outside 🙄" haha. The thing about a lot of stinging flying insects is that they generally won't sting unless they're disturbed (i.e. a bee had climbed into my jacket sleeve in an orchard, so when I put it on, it freaked out, validly—though there are some hornets that are a bit more aggressive) so I try to keep it cool and stay aware of where they are near me, and it's worked pretty well so far!

We did have to get rid of a hornet's nest recently that was next to the front door, which I did not enjoy, but there are limits to interactions. Actually, I just read A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings and am currently reading Braiding Sweetgrass, and both of them have some applicable discussions of interacting with nonhuman life (and the first with bees in particular), so highly recommend checking one or both of those out if you're interested!

In general though I tend to let the urban wildlife do what they're doing, and don't move too quickly around them, and normally that cuts it, though I do draw the line at the squirrel that tried to steal my lunch the other week. -_-