hen trees shed their leaves in fall, laying bare the scaffolding of their branches, Baxter Doty goes hunting. He used to hunt deer regularly and even got himself a pronghorn once in Montana, but now he tracks the nests of the bald-faced hornet, a black-and-white hornet common in North America. The nests, which the hornets make by mixing their saliva with wood fibers they have chewed into a kind of paste, can be as small as 8 inches across, or as large as 3 feet long and a foot across.

Hidden from view by dense foliage during the spring and summer months, when the hornets are active, the nests are most visible during fall and winter. Marvels of engineering and elegant in design, they look a little like oversized Japanese lanterns dangling from tree limbs or tucked into bushes. Abandoned by the hornets when the cold weather sets in, the nests dot the landscape; hornets do not reuse the nests, but build new ones the following year.               

On a cold afternoon, after a tip from a friend, Doty and his companion of six years, Marjorie Stender, with whom he shares a home on a hill in Tunbridge, have driven to a spot near the Chelsea line. On the other end of an old covered bridge is a tree, and in the tree is a bald-faced hornet nest.

There was some anxiety about whether the nest would still be there. Doty has competition. Sometimes he's arrived at a location where he's been told there’s a nest only to find that someone has gotten there ahead of him. He knows who his rival is, and although relations are civil, when it comes to taking possession of a nest, it's every man for himself. “I try to get ’em before he does, of course,” he said. Doty is careful to ask permission of land owners when a nest is on private property, however.

“I do ask people. I don't just go and cut 'em down,” he said.

This nest is still there, hanging some 12 feet off the ground in a tree just past the covered bridge. Stender accompanies Doty on his expeditions but in cold weather prefers to sit in the warm cab of his pick-up truck while he works.

To get at the nest, Doty deploys a long pole with a hook attached. After some finagling, he manages to get the nest down by inserting the hook into the nest and bringing it down gently. He then examines it. It's weather-beaten and through the tears in the nest you can see the intricate chambers inside, as well as the hole through which the wasps entered and exited. “I just think they're amazing,” Doty said, with the wondering tone of a boy. “No flaws in that one. They did a good job on that one.”

He points out the delicate paper and the way the hornets have made the walls of the nest about two inches thick all the way around to protect them from both cold and heat.

By the time Doty gets to the nests, the hornets are gone. Occasionally when he gets one home a dead hornet will fall out, but that is rare. Another reason to wait for fall: less danger of stirring up the hornets. It's not clear whether the term “mad as a hornet” was derived from someone experiencing the wrath of bald-faced hornets, but Doty came too close for comfort one time when he investigated a nest too early in the season. Bald-faced hornets are known for the zealousness with which they guard their nests.

“I did that once and the bees were after me,” he said.

“When they came after him, he clambered up the bank in a hurry,” Stender said with a chortle.

Doty admires the nests in the same way someone might admire and covet a particular variety of rare orchid or a Winslow Homer watercolor. “We saw a nice one over to Dickerman Hill, over a pond. Oh, that nest was a beauty,” he said, looking a little wistful. And he's heard of a giant nest down in Claremont, hanging from a traffic light or maybe a power line over Main Street. But to get that one, he estimated, would require a fire truck with a ladder and complications, such as securing permission and stopping traffic. Not impossible, but unlikely.

Stender, who is 83 and grew up in South Royalton, remembers the days when old timers practiced the art of bee lining, tracking the more-or-less straight line wild bees made as they flew back to their hives, thereby revealing the locations of the highly prized wild honey.

Doty has been collecting the nests for close to 20 years and has 100 nests, give or take, hanging from his garage ceiling. One of his prize nests was built by hornets into the opening of a stovepipe. The hornets do not lack for ingenuity when it comes to taking up residence.

Now 67, Doty retired in 2002 from a 30-year job as a driver for the state, doing equipment maintenance and plowing snow from Sandy's Drive-In in Sharon up to East Bethel on Route 14. He's never been married -- “Nope, never wanted to,” he said, shaking his head emphatically -- and lived with his mother, Eva, for many years. His eyes water at mention of her. “I loved her to death; we'd always been together,” he said.

“He was very close to his mother,” Stender said with a nod, sitting in an easy chair across from a shelf holding nearly 100 trophies and plaques that Doty has won for racing in demolition derbies in Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Stender polishes them every so often to keep them gleaming: it takes her about two weeks to get through them all. At her feet is a box of old recipes collected by Eva Doty that Stender is going through, straightening them up.

There are family photographs on the walls: old sepia pictures of earlier generations on both Doty's and Stender's sides. There is a photo of the house where Doty grew up, in South Tunbridge: “This is where I used to live when I was a little duffer,” he said. There is a photo, prominently displayed, of Eva Doty.

Stender and Doty knew each other as members of a local snowmobile club long before they decided to move in together. When Stender's husband Charles died in 1995, Stender rattled around on her own in their South Royalton home. Doty, in a later conversation, recalled that he called her up and asked her whether she'd like to go out. “She thought about it and she said, ‘Yes.’ ”       

“I was kind of lonely roaming around in that big old house,” Stender said. “Baxter lost his mom and he was pretty lonely. Somehow we got to talking and he asked me to come here and house sit (while he was hunting in Maine). And then he didn't want me to go back home.”       

Stender, who is 16 years older than Doty, has the bounce and enthusiasm of youth despite having survived, at her count, two hip replacements, two shoulder replacements, back surgery, heart trouble, cancer of the kidney and cervical cancer. The gap in age was of some concern to her, she said. “I said to Baxter, I'm too old for you. He insisted that I wasn't.”

“Age don't matter,” Doty said as he listened, with a dismissive wave of his hand. He, too, has a youthful face and demeanor, with an open expression and long eyelashes.

“He's a very easy-going gentleman,” Stender said, although she admitted there was some controversy about whether she would be allowed to bring her cat, Sparky, with her when she moved in. He has dark splotchy markings on white fur, and Stender calls him “the Holstein cat.

“I said you could never in the world find a cleaner cat than this one,” she told Doty. So Doty assented. He had his habits and possessions, and she had hers -- among them a Yamaha electric keyboard that she plays, and paintings she has done.

Doty, it turns out, is a collector of all sorts of thing -- not just hornets nests, but racing trophies, old pictures, memorabilia and cars. Over the years he's owned a 1930 Chevy, a 1930 Model-A pick-up, a 1930 Five Window Coupe with a rumble seat, 1965 and 1966 Chevelle Malibu convertibles, a 1931 Chevy four-door special and a blue 1968 Corvette that sits in his garage.

“You try to collect money, too, but it's a little slow,” Stender teases.

In his garage, Doty points out some nests of which he's particularly proud. He began by taking small nests and worked his way up to the larger ones.

A license plate on a wall that Doty used to hang on the side of one of his demolition derby cars reads Bug: one of Doty's childhood nicknames, along with Bax. His older brother, now dead, called him Bug when Baxter was an infant because he couldn't yet pronounce Baxter.

Now that Route 107 has reopened, Doty would like to take a trip past Stockbridge in search of a nest he's spotted. It's down by the White River on a section of road that people call Refrigerator Flats, because it’s always, in his words, “so damn cold.” It might be difficult to reach because of the flooding and reconstruction but, let there be no doubt, Baxter Doty will find a way.

Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.