That bug ain't no lady! (Helpful insects, revisited)

Some time back, I posted on my trials and tribulations of trying to get ladybugs to inhabit our flower garden. Today, I encountered yet another member of class insecta, a praying mantis. This praying mantis.

I was walking around the house when I saw a blue-green object flutter its way into the entryway of the house next door. Thinking it was a butterfly, I went over to investigate.

Didja know praying mantises (at least this praying mantis) will crawl up on an offered finger? Check it out:
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Knowing they're carnivores, we tried to feed this one raw hamburger on the end of a toothpick. It seems they don't really go for hamburger. He just kept twisting his big ol' Arsenio Hall-like triangle head at me.

Now, everything was going well. The mantis was crawling across my hand, my wife was happily snapping pictures - see? Until...>

...well, sadly, I don't have a picture of the worthless beast did next.

I was just standing there, minding my own business, allowing this little representative of phylum arthropoda to use my hand as a perch, and he, well...let's just say, if we had our camcorder out, we'd be trying to contact the people who make those lame videos they sell late at night on cable with a new title: When Mantids Attack.

Freakin' insolent little son-of-a-locust came at me. At my face.

I swear, all he needed was a little, tiny white bandana with Japanese lettering and a blood-red rising sun design on it wrapped around his little forehead to make his Kamikaze run complete.



Two things happened at that very moment: the first was Katrina bolted through the screen door into the house, apparently deciding that if this bug was going to kill her husband, it wasn't going to kill her, too.

The second thing that happened was internal: I had to fight every instinct in my body not to crush that damnable little thing between my fingers.

Trouble is, another fear was working deeper inside of me - the irrational notion that trying to do that very feat would just piss the freaking thing off. And anyone who's been chased by a swarm of angry bees, or ever had a nightmare about it, or, geez, even thought about it, would agree it's not something that's high on the list of things one would want to have happen.

(On a side note, isn't it funny [and I'm speaking mostly to my born 'n bred in Southern California readers, where there aren't really any insects left, save killer bees, I hear] how people who grew up in rural environments seem to have this total nonchalant attitude toward the insect world? My father, who spent his boyhood in the "heals and hollers" [that's 'hills and hollows' to you] of East Tennessee, thought absolutely nothing of walking out on the back porch while a seventeen-inch-long bumblebee with a sharpened eight-inch shiv for a stinger held in its anthropomorphic claw buzzed lazily around the patio cover supports, looking for fresh human meat to take back to its hive. "If you don't bother them, they won't bother you," he'd not so much say as intone, like it were sage wisdom of the ages. [Lots of things my dad said came across that way]. My brother Pat, who's nearly as big a sissy when it comes to bees and other stinging insects as I am, upon relating a story of having to wait inside the car one hot summer day during a Tennessee vacation while hornets would flit in and out of the open windows, remarked, "yeah, well how do I know if I'm bothering the bee or not? Maybe by just being here, I'm really cheesing this bee off!")

Which is exactly what I seemed to be doing to the mantis. He'd had enough of the paparazzi gig, and decided to let me know. I somehow managed to maintain my composure enough to gently remove my glasses (where he'd attached himself) and get him back onto my hand.

Meanwhile, Katrina, safely behind the screen door, regaled me with, "Oh, sure, honey - they're not mean bugs! They're nice bugs! They're helpful! They'd never hurt you!"

Trying desperately to retain my sense of cool, I told Katrina I was off to deposit my rather rambunctious friend where he could be of service (and where he'd be away from my freakin' face, lest he get the jones on to fling himself at me again). While debating whether he should be deposited in the vegetable garden or the rose bushes, he took flight, arcing his way across our yard, only to land on the roof of the house next door.



I hope he gets eaten by a bird.


bird food