Retrospective: Pippin and the Hornet

Most of the time when I'd come home, Pippin would be waiting in the kitchen (which is where the door to the outside was) to greet me. Sometimes he'd sleep through my car noise arrival, and then I would go find him to let him know I was home. It was rare, though, that he wasn't waiting in the kitchen.

One day in April of 2011, he wasn't in the kitchen. But he wasn't fast asleep either. He was in the living room, watching something aerial with much fascination. He acknowledged me when I came in from the kitchen with a glance, but went right back to staring at something.

Something flying. Something flying around the living room. It settled on a curtain long enough for me to see what it was.

This wasn't actually the same day, but it's Pippin
in the living room so it counts, sort of.

It was like a bee, in that it had a segmented body with antenae on one end and a stinger on the other end. But it was like a bee in the same way that a Boeing 777 is like an origami paper airplane. This thing was huge! It could have starred in its own Syfy channel late night flick. It looked like an escapee from a Ray Harryhausen movie.

It was terrifying. A part of my brain began screaming and ran and hid in the depths. Unfortunately I had to remain calm and do something useful. The rest of me began to think about what to do.

My first thought: Let's just grab Pippin and abandon the house. Well, okay, not abandon completely--we can go sit on Mom & Daddy's front porch until Daddy gets home and he can take care of it.

There were two problems with this course of action. First, it was incredibly embarrassing. I was a grown woman, years older than college, much less high school, and as a grown woman, I should be perfectly capable of taking care of this sort of thing by myself.

Second and more importantly, I had a friend coming over for movie night. In about a half an hour. And my dad didn't come home for another three or four.

Fine. So I had to be an adult about this. But now what? Do I catch it or kill it?

I got the imagery that goes with the amount of splat a bug that big would make, and the cleanup involved. Hasty shudder. Okay, we don't kill it then. Catch it.

Catch it?! I don't even want to get near it!

Pippin, still fascinated by the flying monstrosity, was also a little puzzled at me standing there, seemingly paralyzed. Wasn't this such a cool thing to watch? Look at it flying all around the ceiling fans and the windows and through the air!

I have a feeling Pippin sometimes thought I was a bit of a wet blanket when it came to enjoying obviously enjoyable things.

Then I remembered I had a bug catcher. It had a long plastic tube with a battery powered vacuum on one end and a plug that you stuck in the other end once you had the bug safely in the tube. This was a marvelous invention with one major problem: the vacuum wasn't strong enough. It wasn't strong enough to corral a camel cricket, much less this escapee from a horror film!

But I tried it anyway, not knowing what else to do. Sure enough, the flying whatever it was didn't even seem to notice that it was supposed to be being sucked into a large tube.

Sigh. Now what?

Well, I also had a net from the time I had an aquarium and fish. It was a large net for an aquarium fish. It might actually just fit the thing currently fascinating Pippin and terrorizing me. The problem was, it was in the kitchen, and I'd have to take my eyes off the creature in order to go get it.

"I have to go get something to catch it with," I told Pippin. "You keep an eye on it and make sure it doesn't get away."

Did I expect him to understand me? Not really. That's a fairly complicated concept. I was mostly making myself feel better. I was hoping I could duck into the kitchen, grab the net, and come back into the living room before it managed to disappear. If something that enormous could disappear. Knowing my luck, it could.

My luck, such as it was, held. As in, I couldn't find the net, search though I might, and when I came back into the living room, it had, quite certainly, disappeared.

I said some unrepeatable things. I looked very carefully all over for it. Something was nagging at the back of my mind, and finally I realized Pippin wanted me to look at him. I don't know how I came to this conclusion, given that he was sitting in the middle of the living room floor, not even looking at me. He was staring in one direction, eyes not moving, ears not twitching.

Feeling like an idiot, because I should have checked in with the predator in the house first, I followed his gaze, and sure enough, pinned on the end of it (so to speak) was the creature, hanging in the fold of the curtain.

My friend was bound to be here any minute. I had to get this thing out of the house. Maybe try the bug vacuum catcher thingy again, now that the critter was not flying through the air?

I crept up on the creature very carefully. Pippin watched with interest. I turned the vacuum on, and eased the tube over the bee-thing, and then quickly plugged the end of the tube once I had the creature in it. The vacuum did help, actually; it kept the thing from being able to launch, at least.

Here it is, the dreadful beast!

I took photos, and looked it up online. The only thing close to it was a hornet. I didn't realize hornets came in extra large. I took a photo with a quarter to show people just how big it was.

And by the way, it seems a whole lot bigger when it's flying around, loose in your living room! 

I took it outside, still in the tube, obviously. Just as my friend pulls into the driveway. She got out of the car, and I asked, while she was still too far away to see it, if she wanted to see this monstrous bee I caught. I couldn't remember if she was one of my friends who finds this sort of thing interesting or extremely creepy. 

She's actually kind of in the middle, but since I had it safely corralled, she came over to take a cautious look. She said later she was glad she had, because she wouldn't have believed it was that big.

Then I had her go to the door. I waited until the pacing hornet got to the end opposite the plug. Then I quickly took the plug out and made a kind of baseball bat hitting a baseball action with the bug catcher, flinging the hornet out into the air.

And then I ran for the kitchen door without looking behind me, having both of us duck in and shut the door very quickly, in case the hornet decided to take revenge. 

After all that, Pippin was tired and took a nap while we had supper and watched our movie, safe from the predations of overly large bees.

sleepy kitty