Praying mantises are cool. If you don’t have them around already, consider buying an egg case – hundreds of ghostly miniature mantises hatch out and, if not dispersed soon enough, voraciously eat each other. The surviving siblings grow to remarkable size over the course of the summer. I got a mantis case for my mom last spring, and she loved it (you can see that I inherited some of my weirdness).
We handle the mantises in our yard, and let them walk on us, all the time. That is, until I came across this gratuitous scene of violence via Bird Watcher’s Digest:
Photos by Richard Walkup, PA
Source: Bird Watcher’s Digest
Apparently when mantises get large enough, they can skewer a hummingbird right out of the air! Ack! I am NOT letting a mantis walk on my face ever again.
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