![]() To be standing in the middle of this action is utterly engrossing. They’ll strafe your head or pass mere inches in front of your face in pursuit of an enemy stealing nectar from THEIR feeder. Imagine having a garden or yard filled with enormous pollinators that can hover in front of a flower motionless or zip off in the blink of an eye, who squabble with each other endlessly and get into ear-piercing chirpy dogfights before your very eyes, and sometimes literally right in front of them. For those of you not fortunate enough to live on continents with hummingbirds, let me give a taste of how enormously entertaining these birds that have become insects can be. They act like mobsters when not atop the tree too. Big is probably more than one bird, but I call them that because the males like to sit up there on their sprucey throne, lording over their domain and flicking their heads from right to left, left to right, like nervous mobsters. Credit: Don Faulkner Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)īehind my house is a blue spruce, at the tip top of which is the favorite perch of my local black-chinned hummingbird, Mr. It pays to look at the small things in the great outdoors.A black-chinned hummingbird shows off its iridescent violet neck feathers, visible only when the light hits them just right. I think that’s a pretty big story to come out of a homely little ootheca! Now that the days are warm, I’m checking regularly to see if those hundreds of hatchlings have burst into the world. Opportunistic and pragmatic, they are fascinating examples of nature’s unique engineering. They are not warm and fuzzy yet neither all good nor all bad. With their triangular heads, which can swivel 180 degrees, compound eyes that enable them to detect movement with precision, and their front legs perfectly built for swiftly snatching prey, mantises are almost alien in their appearance. ![]() ![]() They are not particular in their tastes and, among other things, eat grasshoppers, crickets, earwigs, and tomato worms as well as beneficial insects such as lady bugs and various pollinators. Mantises lie in wait for prey to come their way, then, with great speed, they ambush the unsuspecting insect. As they dry out, they will disperse, but if there is not enough to eat, the young will begin to consume each other. Nymphs do not go through a metamorphic stage but resemble the adult when they hatch. In spring, about mid-May, the young hatch. She then attaches the egg case to a leaf or twig where it remains over the winter. After they mate, the female devours the male although sometimes she does this during mating. ![]() Their other behaviors, however, give a different impression. They do eat aphids and other soft-bodied insects when young but then move on to larger insects.īecause they hold their front legs in a praying position and because they perch patiently on bushes and plants waiting for food, they have been invested with spiritual meaning by some cultures. I had heard they are beneficial because they eat, among other thing, aphids. The discovery of two egg cases this spring led me to learn more about this insect. We had only started noticing praying mantises in our yard a couple of years ago, and we had never seen the egg cases or ootheca. Most likely it’s the egg case of a praying mantis. At first glance, it might resemble a dried leaf that has curled or a canker of some sort with a circumference roughly equal to that of a quarter. One of the signs of spring that can easily be overlooked is a globular formation attached to a twig in a tree or on a shrub.
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