Cato

The bottleneck is that you are reading letters instead of words, and your flashcards trained the letters harder.

Fluent readers do not identify individual notes. They see a shape — a third, a triad, a scale fragment, a familiar chord in a familiar inversion — and their hand knows it. What is on the page is the same information, but it is being consumed in chunks of five or six notes rather than one at a time. That is why they can look ahead: the current chunk is already handled.

This is exactly the reading analogy you used, and it goes further than you might think. You do not read English letter by letter and you also do not read it word by word — you take in phrases. Sheet music works the same way and the units are intervals and chords.

So flashcards did what they promise, which is faster letter identification, and letters were never the limit.

The thing worth doing, and it is a spring job rather than a now job: close the gap.

Since the appeal is the cavity and its small entrance, removing it removes the site. Fine mesh over the gap, or filling it if it is not doing anything structural, is far more effective than any spray or deterrent. Do it in late winter before queens are scouting — March in most temperate places — because doing it now risks sealing something in and doing it in May risks sealing something in that you have not noticed.

Also worth removing the old nest material if it is still there once the activity stops. Not because it attracts wasps — it does not — but because it attracts beetles and moth larvae that feed on it, and those are a genuinely more annoying shed problem than the wasps were.

The sampling point is the one I had not considered. I had been assuming the camera was showing something continuously true rather than catching one frame of something in motion.