"Your transformation
will be the miracle."
-- Holly Lynn Payne,
DAMASCENA: The Tale of Roses and Rumi
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| Praying Mantis ootheca (egg sack) 12-1-14 |
"Today for show and tell,
I've brought a tiny miracle of nature."
-- Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"For a moment, our eyes see and our ears can hear
what is there around us always."
My guys did a lot of hunting over the long Thanksgiving weekend.
That means instead of sleeping late like most of his his classmates, Leo was up at the ass-crack of dawn, dressed in camo and face paint, hunkered down in a cold cornfield snuggled up to his 12-gauge shotgun hoping to shoot geese out of the sky.
In the afternoons, they went traipsing around the woods hunting rabbits and pheasants.
In all they bagged one goose, one pheasant and two doves (which produce the meat equivalent of a chicken nugget).
While hunting in the woods, they also found several Praying Mantis egg sacks, or ootheca.
It's a good thing they brought them home. I didn't know this, but it's a good idea to relocate Praying Mantis eggs into territory away from the cannibalistic carnivorous mother who laid them so that she doesn't eat her own hatchlings.
My husband stashed the egg sacks in sheltered spots outside in the shrubbery. Come springtime, hopefully the ootheca will crack open and nymphs will hatch and we'll have baby Praying Mantises again.
Baby Praying Mantises are tiny miracles of nature -- perfect, exact, miniature, impossibly small replicas of the big guys. I love having them around the yard and garden, so I am happy to provide them room and board -- garden plants, flowers and all the associated pests they can eat -- as long as they want to stick around for the buffet.
I guess you could say we're preying for a miracle.
Heh. Heh. Good one.
I guess you could say we're preying for a miracle.
Heh. Heh. Good one.
