I had seen this handsome and rather frighteningly large wasp patrolling a variety of flowers throughout the month, but, because I had other natural and human history items on my agenda... chief among them, taking care of my granddaughter... I never got around to identifying the handsome insect, with its two-toned abdomen and legs. But today, on a walk I helped lead, the wasp showed up on some Goldenrod flowers, and when one of the attendees asked for an ID, well, I was on the hook. I didn't have a wasp field guide handy—as near as I know, there isn't one available—so I went to the web, starting with a Google search for "wasps with red and black abdomens." That pointed me, eventually, to BugGuide.net, which is my go-to source anyway, and there, I quickly wound up in the Sphex Wasp section, which is devoted to these tunnel-making solitary hymenopterans. There were a lot of them to wade through, but after only a modest amount of my own tunneling, I settled on one common and likely suspect known as the Great Golden Digger Wasp. With any luck, Sphex ichneumoneus will stick in my memory banks and I'll have the ID handy on the next encounter.