I had a very intense encounter with an insect today. I was cleaning up the front garden when I looked down and saw a bright green praying mantis at the base of the porch. It was clutching an identifiable insect, and I had obviously disturbed its head-first meal.
The mantis watched my every move, swiveling its triangle head to stare at me with all-seeing eyes. I’ve experienced this before with mantises, but this time the mantis began to move exactly like a mammal. It tucked its bug under its arm like a football and carried it deeper under the porch, eyes on me the entire time. I had the eerie sensation of watching a wolf drag a deer haunch deeper into a cave. This insect had caught a meal, and there was nothing I could do that would scare it from abandoning food.
I am so used to being around easily frightened birds and insects and even large mammals, all of which usually drop whatever they’re doing in my presence, that the deliberateness with which this mantis protected its quarry while strategically repositioning was nothing short of astonishing. The intelligence of its deliberate movement gave me chills.
And I was happy to for it to go on its well-fed way. Praying mantises are treated as gods around here for the benefits they bestow upon the garden by eating all sorts of insect pests. I’ve gone so far as to clip mantis egg cases from shrubs in the about-to-be-bushogged field, only to relocate them to a safe place in the garden. And today, after seeing this mantis off, I found a mantis egg case in the mint patch by the garden. Every scraggly stem, but for the one that bore this egg case, was clipped and carted to the compost pile.
What does a mantis egg case look like?