Finding specimens

 If you walk with a dog, you must clean up after him, and it was while performing this usually unmentioned duty that I discovered a wasp gall.

The gall was on the leaf of a white oak sapling and looked like a fuzzy marble, almost as big as a taw. The gall will soon fall with the leaf to the forest floor. In the spring, a wasp will emerge.

It seemed to be Druon quercusflocci. If I were a certain kind of naturalist I’d put the gall in a sheltered spot in the garage, wait for it to emerge in the spring and try to identify the adult. But the Wise Woman would object, so I proceed with doubt.

But the greater question, it seems to me, is how anyone who doesn’t have a dog finds these little specimens.