The first time I saw a painted bunting was in the mid-1980s while tagging along with my brother, who was birdwatching in some fields and woods adjacent to his home near Wagner, SC. The sighting was actually more of a glimpse than a look, as the bird — first detected by my brother through its song — disappeared as quickly as it appeared in a flash of color flown from one leafy canopy to another.
The second time I saw a painted bunting was thirty years later, in 2016. Looking out the window one April morning, I saw something curious and said. “Why does that bird have a green leaf stuck to its back?”
Looking through the binoculars I saw that it wasn’t a leaf, but a brilliant patch of lime-colored feathers on the most fantastically colored bird I’d ever seen. “A painted bunting!” I exclaimed. I quickly took photos to document the sighting. These, below, were the least blurry of the batch.
I shared the photos with my brother and fellow birdwatching friends who urged me to keep my eyes peeled for the female, who should arrive any day. Sure enough, she arrived a week later — a small parrot-green bird with breast feathers in shades of yellow and peach that, at times, seemed to emanate a light, like a sunrise.
Since then, the painted buntings have returned every year. They have also increased in numbers. In 2018, two pairs came to the feeders. More arrived in subsequent years. I could never completely confirm the numbers. They are quick little birds and quick to flit away at the slightest disturbance. There were enough of the birds, tho, that I began referring to them as a colony of painted buntings.
This year, I finally confirmed a total of five males. How did I do this? I spent the first week or so after their arrival studying the birds, trying to memorize the color variations and subtle shape differences of each bird. Some are roundish, others more sleek and elongated; some have vivid red breasts, and others tend toward orange; the color patches on different birds vary in size and shape. No two painted buntings are alike! Through observing, I’d already determined that we had at least four different males, but I suspected more. Then one day, the implausible happened. All five males arrived to the feeding area at once, confirming my suspicions. The photo below, taken by iPad, doesn’t prove the existence of one, much less five painted buntings, but I post it here to preserve the moment.
Each spring, the first male painted buntings arrive like clockwork around April 14-16. One to three weeks later the first female arrives. The birds are always famished on arrival and spend long, long spells at the feeders. This is the only time I’ve seen them refuse to budge when other birds approach the feeder or try to bully them away.
So where is the mystery? It happens sometime in July. The buntings disappear entirely from the feeders. Each time this has happened, including this year, I’ve been alarmed and saddened, thinking something must have happened to the birds. And each time, including this year, the buntings reappeared to the feeders in late August or early September. The only difference this year is that I’ve slowed down enough to give the matter some thought, record their return on the calendar, and do a bit of research.
I don’t have a definitive answer to the mystery, just a pretty good idea, courtesy of several sources, including the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology site. As it turns out, painted buntings spend most of the year eating seeds from the fields, marshes and, as available, bird-feeders. During breeding season, however, they switch to spiders and insects such as caterpillars, wasps, flies, grasshoppers, weevils and beetles, which they feed to their young. During breeding season, they also tend to forage higher in the trees, sometimes 30 feet off the ground.
When the buntings returned to the feeders this year in early September, they were in full molt, looking disheveled and moth-eaten. Their feathers have since mostly come in, and the males are back to vividly colored perfection. Soon, they’ll be ready to make their return to Cuba and other points south where they’ll spend the winter.
The females and young have been all but absent this year. I do remain a little concerned, especially since a wave of avian pox swept through in mid-summer, forcing me to take the feeders down for two weeks. I’ve decided that, rather than worry over their plight, I’ll assume this to be another mystery that might be solved one year.
For now, I know that the original five males appear to have survived the summer, including the one with the dangling, deformed leg, who has been here for two summers now, answering the question, “Do the same birds return every year?” It appears they may.
It is September — sand pear season! For those unfamiliar with sand pears, these hard, gritty fruits are an old-fashioned favorite among southerners who appreciate their unusual qualities, not the least of which is the tree’s habit of thriving in southern climates. Over the years, I’ve taken many photographs and journaled about the two sand pear trees in my mother’s yard. Below is a collection of entries from recent years.
First Day of Spring 2014
Our old pear tree is in full flower this week. This is one of two trees that my mother and father planted in the late 1970s.
Pear blossoms and blue skies
Lovely, ethereal and sensual, pear flowers open in the morning, their stamens unfurling to reveal pink, fleshy anthers.
Within hours, the pollen bursts from anthers, ready to be carried by visiting bees to the flower’s center, to the pistils, which elongate in anticipation.
Mason bees and other native pollinators hard at work.
Once the pollen is released, or dehisced, the anthers shrivel and turn brown. By the next morning, the petals will have fallen.
Already, the ovary of the fertilized flower is swelling, becoming a pear. If a late frost doesn’t kill the budding fruit, they will grow and, come May, the tree will be filled with hundreds of perfect young pears.
The sand pear in late May.
Late Summer 2015
This type of pear (Pyrus pyrifolia) goes by a number of names — sand pear, Asian pear and apple pear, to name a few. By nature, these trees sometimes age into ungraceful poses– their bare branches resembling, in winter, the collapsed staves of a broken umbrella. In late summer these limbs bear the weight of hundreds of hard, delicately flavored pears.
The fruits have a long harvest season, remaining persistently hard throughout. They never grow soft, like a Bartlett pear, nor do they attain that level of sweetness. They become edible in late July, but are better once the begin to fall to the ground in August and September.
The sand pear in late July.
As the possums, deer, raccoons, fire ants and yellow jackets can attest, this is when the pears are ripe for eating.
Most years, we’ve had have a bumper crop of sand pears. Hard, crisp and mild-flavored with a satisfying grit for pear lovers, these pears are similar to, but a little different from the Asian pears you buy at the grocery.
They are good eaten out of hand or made into relish and chutneys. If you had a grandmother or great-grandmother who lived in the south from the 1970s back, she likely had a recipe for pear relish in her recipe box.
Sand pears are also wonderful sliced into green salads with a lemon-poppy dressing. They also taste wonderful sliced and dipped in sea-salted caramel on a cool fall evening.
My mother and father never cared much for the fruit, so every year, they invited old timers over to harvest them. The old timers would leave with baskets and boxes filled with sand pears and, in return a few weeks later, gift us with a few jars of pear relish – a savory southern delicacy served atop meats, greens and other vegetables. As the old timers passed away, so did the gifts.
Fire Blight, Wind and Frost 2016-2019
For a few years, it seemed the late frosts, wind storms, and fire blight had finally taken their toll. The leaves were black from fire blight. Late frosts kept killing the fruit. Major limbs had been broken and were hanging lifeless from the trees. There was talk of cutting the trees down, but I refused, preferring to allow them a natural death. I spent these years saying my goodbyes.
October 2017: Ah, our beautiful pear trees! The last two springs have brought late spring frosts that killed the young pears. The trees are near the end of their life span, so I don’t know if we’ll ever see another big crop, but I do dream about them.
October 2018: Has it been only 3 years? My, the things time changes as it flies.
March 2019: Storms and age have taken their toll over the years, and there is little left to them but broken, bare branches falling one by one back to the earth…. The memories are pretty sweet. I’m glad I have the old photos.
September 2019: Gosh, has it been only 4 years? The pear trees finally succumbed to the fire blight and the late spring freezes. But what lovely memories they left in their wake. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may….
Late Summer 2020
So imagine my surprise when I happened to be in that part of the yard one morning and, glancing over, saw the trees all green with leaves and with hundreds of pears on the trees. I felt like celebrating!
I made an apple pear pie to celebrate the 2020 crop. I was sick with Covid that year and forgot to take a picture of the finished pie. We’ve enjoyed a crop every year since.
The pears are, of course, fewer these years. The ground would usually be covered with half-eaten pears by now, but there were only three pears on the ground when I took this picture last week.
I picked my first pear that same day.
If the pears seem a little sweeter this year, that’s the memories talking.
Throughout autumn, the pears will continue to fall until, perhaps, late November…
…when the very last pear will fall.
Come spring, the flowers and bees will return, ready for an encore.
Every year, I wait and watch for the springtime arrival of “my” Yellow-Billed Cuckoos from their South American wintering grounds. While I’ve only ever seen them on three or four occasions, the landscape would seem empty without them. Now that summer is drawing nigh, I’m still waiting to see them. Cuckoos are very reclusive birds. Many people go their whole lives without realizing we have Yellow-Billed Cuckoos in our area. While sightings may be rare, they do have a way of making their presence known.
My yard provides ideal habitat — generous tree canopy from the surrounding woods, bordered with open sky and, nearby, creeks and ponds. Come May, I’ll be sitting in my backyard soaking up the springtime sun when, all of the sudden, I’ll hear that familiar Cuckoo song emanating from the depths of some dense foliage. Song? Well, I’ll admit that description is a little generous. To me, it sounds more like a frog, or, as others have described it, a door knocker hitting a metal plate. It is a rapid, throaty “ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-kow-kow-kow-kowlp-kowlp-kowlp.” Not a typical bird song, I’ll admit.
Often, loud noises, such as thunder, will provoke them to burst forth in this “song,” which has led to their alternate name as Rain Crows — foretellers of rain. This year, I learned that Cuckoos actually have two songs. As the summer days laten, they may switch their song to something that sounds more like a Mourning Dove. It is rather continuous and lengthy “ooh-ooh-ooh,” or it could be described as “coo-coo-coo-coo.”
Thinking about this for a short time, I had to smack myself in the head. I realized that this is how they got their name! Coo-coo. Cuckoo! Sometimes I’m a little slow at catching on to these things. A range of their song variations can be here at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Macaulay Library. Below is a short clip from of a Yellow-Billed Cuckoo calling from the trees of an Arkansas farmstead.
During my online research this week, I learned that the words “kook” and “kooky” are derived from the name of this bird. How anyone can characterize Cuckoos as being crazy is beyond me. It seems that, in the olden days, people heard these birds cooing incessantly throughout the day and began labeling anyone who speaks senselessly and pointlessly as being cuckoo.
Although the subject was in debate for quite a while, it has been determined that the Yellow-Billed Cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus) is indeed related to the European Cuckoo (of clock fame). Also in the family is the South American Ani (of crossword puzzle fame) and the Roadrunner (of Saturday morning cartoon fame).
If you should ever be lucky enough to see one, they are very beautiful birds — long and slender, about 10 to 12 inches in length, with light brown coloration above and a clean white color below. Also, there is a large cinnamon-colored patch on each wing. Most distinctive to me is the long black tail with bold white spots on the underside. When flying, that long tail seems to flap in the breeze– just as might a flag or a banner.
Cuckoos are very shy and retiring birds. They mostly sit in the depths of some dense tree watching for movement… a cicada, a katydid, a beetle, a small lizard or frog. These are a part of their diet. What Cuckoos are best known for, however, is their voracious appetite for caterpillars. In the northern part of their range, they consume plentiful quantities of Gypsy Moth caterpillars. In our neck of the woods, they eat Tent Caterpillars (Malacocoma americanum) in the spring, and Webworms (Hyphantria cunea) in the fall. A single Cuckoo can down 100 caterpillars in one sitting.
Contrary to popular belief, the foliage-munching Tent Caterpillars and Webworms, (which are actually caterpillars), do not typically damage trees. At worst, the sight may be aesthetically displeasing for a while. But the leaves grow back, and life goes on. The populations of these caterpillars are actually kept in check by predators such as birds, spiders and wasps. In the spring, Tent Caterpillars are an important food source for many nesting birds and for the many species of migrating birds arrive to our area. The Webworms of autumn likewise provide migrating birds with the energy they need to return to their wintering grounds — a distance that, in the case of the Yellow-Billed Cuckoos, may range as far south as Argentina.
Property owners tempted to take up arms by poisoning and torching these caterpillars would do well to remember the old saw about beauty being in the eye of the beholder. To a bird at the beginning or the end of a very long journey, the sight of a webbed nest in a tree is a thing of beauty, indeed.
September is here, and soon it will be time for the Cuckoos and the youngsters they have raised to return to their wintering grounds in South and Central America. I do so worry about them and their perilous journeys. Being night fliers, there is the constant danger of losing course due to light pollution and to collisions with buildings and communication towers (cell, TV, and others). An American Bird Conservancy study of just 17 of these towers reported the deaths of 586 Cuckoos from collision with guy wires and the towers themselves. Sadly, 4 to 5 million songbirds are killed yearly during migration in these collisions. Between the man-made hazards of migration, pesticides and habitat loss, the numbers of Yellow-Billed Cuckoos are said to be in steep decline. To be sure, I will be anxiously awaiting the return of “my” birds next year. In his poem ‘To the Cuckoo,’ William Wordsworth may have said it best.
Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring! Even yet thou art to me No bird, but an invisible thing, A voice, a mystery.
Contributor Burt Glover became an accidental naturalist during his earliest childhood days exploring the dirt roads, backyards, polo field and barns of the Magnolia-Knox-Mead neighborhood of 1950s Aiken. Birds are his first love, and he can identify an impressive range by song alone. He asserts that he is an observer, not an expert, on the topics of his writings, which range from birds, box turtles, frogs and foraging, to wasps, weeds, weather and beyond.
There are some who might accuse me of being easily amused. Okay, I’ll just plead guilty to that, here and now, but hear me out. This is day five that I’ve witnessed a leaf from the Water Oak tree in my front yard spinning from the end of a 6-inch-long strand of spider web. Five days of spinning in the late summer breezes like a whirly-gig, and the strand of silk holds steady. No visible twisting or breakage. Aren’t spider webs amazing? For that matter, aren’t the spiders that spin them amazing?
That spinning leaf is only one of many in my tree. Like it or not, spiders, and their webs, are everywhere. Go out on a foggy morning when the sun is just beginning to break through and you will see so many thousands of spider webs streaming off of trees, weeds, porch ceilings, and power lines; webs strewn across the fields like so many handkerchiefs in the morning sun, silk trailing from every conceivable surface. Many surveys have been done to estimate spider populations. On the conservative side, there is the figure of 6 to 10 spiders per square meter. That translates to 40,461 spiders per acre of land. Some estimates go much higher. An entomological survey of North Carolina homes found spiders in 100% of the homes surveyed. Spiders are everywhere! Likely there is one watching you from a nearby corner as you read this.
Spider silk is several times stronger than any other known silk. Its strength is five times that of similar diameter steel, or any other man-made substance, but is extremely stretch resistant and lightweight at the same time. A spider web might contain several types of silk — a softer, sticky silk to capture prey, and stronger silk to attach the web from stem to branch. The tensile strength of the silk of the golden orb weaver is said to be among the strongest. I can attest to this.
One recent autumn, I found the remains of an enormous and elaborately woven web of a golden orb weaver. The web had been held aloft by powerful “guy wires,” one of which was strung a 15-foot distance from the barn soffit to the limb of a tulip poplar. Fallen poplar leaves had become entangled in the saffron-colored silk. The sight of it drew my curiosity. I had to tug really hard to detach it from the tree. It never broke. The silk had the look, feel and strength of synthetic sewing thread and was easily as strong. I put a strand of blue sewing thread beside it for comparison.
I found a photo of a cape that was woven from golden orb weaver silk. Look closely to see the hand-sewn brocade spiders. This cape was part of a project in Madagascar that took years and the silk of over a million golden orb weaver spiders to complete. The methods for extracting the silk from spiders, while presented as benign in a video on this project, seem anything but or I’d go into more detail.
Many studies are ongoing to produce bullet-proof vests from spider silk. Silkworms, when gathered together, are totally non-competitive, freely spinning their silk. Spiders are not as hospitable, tending to want to eat each other. Not good for mass production. The human solution? Insert spider silk-producing genes into goat embryos. When grown to adults, these goats will produce milk from which spider web proteins can be extracted. These Frankensteinian experiments are ongoing, but it is foretold that, someday, we will all be wearing spider silk clothing.
Meanwhile, I will spend my time watching my spinning leaves and admiring the hardworking creatures that produce them. I cannot help but fall in love with the teddy bear-like jumping spiders that hop about the porch railing, watching me with a curiosity that matches my own.
There, too, are the beautiful black and yellow garden spiders, Agriopes, spinning and mending their late-summer webs. Nearby is a green lynx spider poised on the petal of a water hyacinth. Down below are the ferocious wolf spiders, there to keep the populations of less desirable insects in check. Inside my house are the southern house spiders who oversee the crevices and crannies, snaring insect intruders in the house.
Worldwide, spiders are estimated to eat 400,000 to 800.000 tons of prey per year. (The Titanic weighed 52,000 tons.) At the same time, these huge populations of spiders provide a major food source for birds, lizards, toads, frogs, dragonflies, etc. It is all about life and living. It may be trivial to some, but our survival as humans may well depend on spiders and the continuity of this chain of life.
I defer to the words of E. B. White in his reference to writing Charlotte’s Web (a story that many of us should probably read again and again):
“Once you begin watching spiders, you haven’t time for much else– the world is really loaded with them. I do not find them repulsive or revolting, any more than I find anything else in nature repulsive or revolting, and I think that it is too bad that children are often corrupted by their elders in this hate campaign.”
Contributor Burt Glover became an accidental naturalist during his earliest childhood days exploring the dirt roads, backyards, polo field and barns of the Magnolia-Knox-Mead neighborhood of 1950s Aiken. Birds are his first love, and he can identify an impressive range by song alone. He asserts that he is an observer, not an expert, on the topics of his writings, which range from birds, box turtles, frogs and foraging, to wasps, weeds, weather and beyond.
After spending too much of my summer energies mourning the tragedies of the latest US war, I’ve decided to put my time, my research skills, and my helplessness to better use: explaining the enchanting beasts that have been summering on the moonflower vine outside our kitchen window.
Of Physiognomy
I considered all possible lenses through which to view these moonflower enchantresses — the poetic, the literary, the philosophical, the scientific. I finally settled on them all, turning the matter over to the authority on each and every facet, Jean-Henri Fabre, the father of literary entomology.
It was Fabre who, during the 19th century, was born to this earth possessing the tongue of a poet, the soul of a philosopher, and an innate, yet uncanny fascination with insects. The scientific instrument has yet to be invented that could hope to replicate what Fabre observed with the naked eye. His gift to science endures today, not just because of the body of knowledge he left on each insect he studied, but because, in his words, “I cause itto be loved.”
Unlike many scientists, Fabre did not travel the world to discover the exotic, but found it within the kingdom of his own backyard. Gathering his subjects from nearby fields and woods, he assembled a menagerie that included fantastical Great Peacock Moths, Pine Processionary Caterpillars, Sacred Beetles, Cicadas and that veritable tigress of the insect kingdom, the Praying Mantis, about whom he eloquently observed:
She is not without a certain beauty, in fact, with her slender figure, her elegant bust, her pale-green coloring and her long gauze wings. No ferocious mandibles, opening like shears; on the contrary, a dainty pointed muzzle that seems made for billing and cooing…. Alone among insects, the Mantis directs her gaze; she inspects and examines; she almost has a physiognomy. Fabre, J. Henri, The Life of the Grasshopper , 1917, p. 115.
But Fabre was no romantic. He was nothing, if not shrewd in his observation of the Mantis, whose mating habits, he said, went “beyond the wildest dreams of the most horrible imagination. I have seen it done with my own eyes,” he wrote, “and have not yet recovered from my astonishment.”
I find, by themselves, a horrible couple engaged as follows. The male, absorbed in the performance of his vital functions, holds the female in a tight embrace. But the wretch has no head; he has no neck; he has hardly a body. The other, with her muzzle turned over her shoulder continues very placidly to gnaw what remains of the gentle swain. And, all the time, that masculine stump, holding on firmly, goes on with the business!
Love is stronger than death, men say. Taken literally, the aphorism has never received a more brilliant confirmation. A headless creature, an insect amputated down to the middle of the chest, a very corpse persists in endeavouring to give life. It will not let go until the abdomen, the seat of the procreative organs, is attacked. — Fabre, J. Henri, The Life of the Grasshopper , 1917, p. 144.
I, myself, have never witnessed this act, although we have been watching the Praying Mantises outside the window since July — watching them tranform from thin-waisted maidens, to fat, egg-laden matrons. Ours are neither the European Mantis (Mantis religiosa) of Fabre’s laboratory, nor the giant Chinese Mantis (Tenodera sinensis) whose manners gave birth to the Praying Mantis school of kung fu in 17th century China. The latter mantises are immigrants, which traveled to America aboard nursery stock around the time of the Spanish-American War and are now naturalized.
Our moon flower sisters are Carolina Mantises (Stagmomantis carolina), which are not only native to this land but are the official State Insect of my home state, South Carolina.
The moon flower vine was not my first encounter with the Carolina Mantis. Several years ago, in another house, a lovely she-Mantis lived in the Japanese ligustrum beside my front porch, where the two of us watched, in tandem, the passers-by. Here she is:
She was my first day-to-day, up-close encounter with a Mantis — the first Mantis with whom I exchanged eye contact and experienced that ethereal thing that Mantises do. Tracking my movement with that curiously pivoting head, she watched as I peered through the branches trying to find the best angle for viewing her. She watched me; I watched her. In utter silence, and each for our own reasons, we gazed.
During my reading, I’ve puzzled over the treatment of the Mantis by modern science. How is it possible to reduce such a fantastically-constructed creature to so much white noise? I’ll show you.
Compare the forelegs (seen in ‘prayer’ in the photograph above) with the photo, below, taken this summer. Then compare these photos to the following two descriptions — both quoted from scientific texts.
First, the “modern science” treatment:
“The mantid’s forelegs are raptorial with elongated coxae and femora with the presence of opposed rows of spines on the femora and the tibiae.” — Prete, Frederic R., Et. al,, The Praying Mantids, 1999, p. 21.
Imagine pages of such text. Is it any wonder that schoolchildren sometimes daydream of other worlds during science lessons? For Prete and company, that one sentence sufficed for those deadly arms.
Not so for J. Henri Fabre:
Those arms, folded in prayer, are cut-throat weapons: they tell no beads, they slay whatever passes within range…. Great, indeed is the contrast between the body as a whole, with its very pacific aspect, and the murderous mechanism of the forelegs, which are correctly described as raptorial. The haunch is uncommonly long and powerful. Its function is to throw forward the rat-trap, which does not await its victim but goes in search of it. The snare is decked out with some show of finery….
The thigh, longer still, a sort of flattened spindle, carries on the front half of its lower surface two rows of sharp spikes. In the inner row there are a dozen, alternately black and green, the green being shorter than the black. This alternation of unequal lengths increases the number of cogs and improves the effectiveness of the weapon. The outer row is simpler and has only four teeth. Lastly, three spurs, the longest of all, stand out beneath the two rows. In short, the thigh is a saw with two parallel blades, separated by a groove in which the leg lies when folded back.
The leg, which moves very easily on its joint with the thigh, is likewise a double-edged saw. The teeth are smaller, more numerous and closer together than those on the thigh. It ends in a strong hook whose point vies the finest needle for sharpness, a hook fluted underneath and having a double blade like a curved pruning knife. …
When at rest, the trap is folded and pressed back against the chest and looks quite harmless. There you have the insect praying. But, should a victim pass, the attitude of prayer is dropped abruptly. Suddenly, unfolded, the three long sections of the machine throw to a distance their terminal grapnel, which harpoons the prey and, in returning, draws it back between the two saws. The vice closes with a movement like that of the forearm and upper arm; and all is over. Locusts, Grasshoppers and others even more powerful, once caught in the mechanism with its four rows of teeth, are irretrievably lost. Neither their desperate fluttering nor their kicking will make the terrible engine release its hold. —
Fabre, J. Henri, The Life of the Grasshopper , 1917, pp. 115-118.
And so the long days of summer have passed among the leaves of the moon flower vine. I can only take Fabre’s word for what has commenced at night in the near-glow of our kitchen light. We’ve never witnessed it. Just the half-eaten remains the morning after — here and there a moth carcass, a scattering of legs and wings, a camel cricket reduced to mere junkyard salvage, its front-end picked of its choice parts, the headlights snatched from their sockets, its taut legs reduced to lifeless wires.
Too, there’s been the steady growth of the two sisters, their appearance as different as night and day. One is colored the precise green of the moonflower stems, each of her wings marked with a single, dark eye-spot, called a stigma, which not only mimics leaf blemishes and stem scars, but — with a mere unfurling of her wings — can double as fierce eyes to startle and fend off potential attackers. The other Mantis wears a simple mottled brown frock that depends on the kindness of dead leaves for camouflage.
Both are no doubt responsible for the mysterious disappearance of the ant trails that boldy paraded up and down the vines during early summer, using the vines as a superhighway between the azaleas and the kitchen window, inside which the ants stole to smuggle the stray sugar granules scattered about the coffeepot. We owe the Mantises a debt of gratitude for putting an end to these night marauders, even as our gratitude is tinged with remorse for any Sphinx Moths we unintentionally lured to their deaths by our decision to plant the moonflower vine in that location.
It is with a similar sadness that we see summer coming to a close. As each day of August winds to an end, we are one day closer to the conclusion of the Mantises’ life cycles. If they’ve not already done so, the femme fatales will release, any night now, their pheromones to draw the male Mantises — much smaller and thinner by comparison — who will fertilize the eggs that have so swollen their female’s abdomens. Throughout the courtship season, each female may receive many gentleman callers.
Contrary to popular myth, it is not a given that the male will be consumed during consummation. This practice varies greatly between Mantis species, with the European Mantis being more inclined to cannibalize her mate, and the Carolina Mantis being quite disinclined to do so — to the extent, in fact, that it rarely happens in the wild, unless she is very hungry.
In all cases, this practice is more common in captivity than in the field, where there is less likelihood of the artificial distractions and mis-directed visual cues, which are believed to scramble the sequence of events and trigger the predatory response in the female.
Within a week or so of mating, the female sows the seeds of their progeny. These will be secreted inside a tan, meringue-like egg case, called an ootheca, which she will affix to nearby vegetation or structure. This foamy concoction — measuring, give or take, an inch in length — will quickly set, its myriad tiny air bubbles providing the perfect insulation against the elements for the neatly arranged catacomb of eggs inside. According to Fabre, “the whole thing demands about two hours of concentrated work, free from interruption.”
If this confection doesn’t become the foodstuffs of lizards, wasps or ants during autumn and winter, it will bloom to hatching, come next spring, with 200 or so hungry and often cannibalistic nymphs. The mother may or may not spend the balance of summer watching over her egg cases. Regardless, the laying of the eggs is the beginning of her swan song. By the end of September, the beautiful enchantresses will likely be dead.
The Cyclopean Ear
I apologize that our rudimentary camera skills do not offer a better view of the Mantis’ fascinating ear. Our best efforts at photographing the Mantises, which you see on this page, are testament to my daughter’s persistence with the camera. Below is the underside view of the brown Carolina Mantis on the kitchen window as viewed from indoors.
The single ear of the Mantis, which is unique to the Mantis kingdom — and, even then, to only certain species — is located on the metathorax. Look for it in the pinkish, fleshy area of the belly between the two pairs of legs, where it’s punctuated at its base with a whitish, tooth-shaped appendage, called a bifid horn or tooth, which is also part of the ear. This hearing organ — aptly called a cyclopean ear — has been much-studied by scientists to determine both its purpose and the advantages to its odd location.
Some Mantises, (although I cannot confirm this in the Carolina Mantis), have a second cyclopean ear — a mesothoracic ear — located higher up in the mesothorax, which is capable of hearing in lower ranges, below 10 kHz. I mention this because, to my eyes, there appears to a second ear structure in the photo, above. I hope to one day learn more about this.
In the female, the metothoracic cyclopean ear is little more than a vestigial organ — her hearing capacity diminished or entirely absent, as is the case with most, if not all, of the flightless mantids. Flighted males, on the other hand — who take to the air at night in search of the sirens’ pheromone perfume — need this ear to evade bats, one of their most formidable predators. As such, this ear is set to detect frequencies between 25-60 kHz with thresholds of 50 to 60 decibels— the precise range of bat echolations. At the first hint of this ultrasonic tuning fork, the Mantis stalls mid-flight, like a disabled bi-plane, instantly lowering his wings, which sends him into a freefall spiral toward the ground. Being a single ear, this cyclopean ear lacks the stereo perception necessary to pinpointing the direction of the sound.
Not so with the cerci. Both male and female Mantises (as well as myriad other insects) own a certain capacity for hearing through their cerci, that pair of beaded, antenna-like appendages near the very tip of their rear. Unlike the cylopean ear, designed to hear bats from a relative distance, the cerci are equipped to detect ‘near-field’ sounds — from the arrival of a suitor, to the arrival of prey or, alternately, a predator. In females, the cerci are also used in the delicate frothing and shaping of the ootheca. Studies suggest that the cerci also aid the flighted Mantis in fine-tuning the location of the bat.
I can add little more on the topic of hearing, having already suffered through reading what modern science has to say on its studies of the cyclopean ear and the cerci, which left me with sort of gut pain a person feels reading about human torture and other crimes of war. The modern scientific methods for studying these auditory organs invariably involve barbaric procedures, with much cutting and slitting of the Mantis’s body, including fullscale amputations and decapitations. From this point, the Mantis is wired with various sensors, and its hearing organs coated with wax or petroleum jelly, before being tethered in a laboratory room, to see how it interacts with a bat. If only Fabre were still alive to tutor these scientists in the art of observation.
You rip up the animal, and I study it alive; you turn it into an object of horror and pity, whereas I cause it to be loved; you labour in a torture-chamber and dissecting room, and I make my observations under the blue sky to the song of the Cicadas, you subject cell and protoplasm to chemical tests, I study instinct in its loftiest manifestations; you pry into death, I pry into life. — Fabre, J. Henri,“The Harmas.” The Life of the Fly, 1913, p. 3
Unlike the cyclops ear — the acuity of which increases, as a rule, in direct proportion to the wing-length — the cerci seem to exist in equal measure, regardless of flight abilities or the sex of the mantis. The cerci appear to work in conjunction with the Mantis’ eyes for surveying the surroundings. Mantises have five eyes in all: two large compound eyes with stereoscopic, color vision, that are adept at gauging distance, plus three simple eyes, called ocelli. Located in a triangular formation between the antennae, the ocelli are larger and better developed in males, and are believed to aid in discerning between light and dark. (An aside: to see excellent images of these eyes, plus the source for this information, click here: cirrusimage.com)
Even as the Mantis has excellent eyesight — capable of both sharp, near-distance vision, and the ability to detect movement up to 60 feet away — its compound eyes command only a 300° field of vision, just 60° shy of encompassing a full circle. It makes sense, then, that the Mantis would need compensation for this built-in blind spot, the cerci being the equivalent of the back-up camera in modern vehicles.
That males and female, alike, have well-developed cerci lends credence to the theory that the primary purpose of these organs is to alert the Mantis to approaching prey and predators in the bush, which is where the female Carolina Mantis spends the majority of her life.
This is because the wings of the female Carolina Mantis, in contrast to the male, are of little use for flying. Arriving late in life, and only after her final molt — the last of 7 to 10 molts she undergoes over her lifetime — these wings are too short for real flight and are of no use once her belly becomes too cumbersome for such lofty aspirations. The important thing, however, is not what she can’t do, but what she can do with these exquisite parasails.
An August Affair
The morning we took the photo, below, our attention had been drawn from our morning routines in the kitchen to the startling sight of the brown Mantis outside the window — her barbed forelegs waving about in a most un-prayerful manner, her wings unfurled like an exotic bird of paradise. Something was the matter.
Whatever the matter, it was pressing enough to render the nearby spittle bug inconsequential. The two Mantises spent the balance of the morning moving about the vine, much like boxers in a ring, only they inched further and further apart until, at last, the brown one removed herself entirely from the equation — creeping, brick by brick, away from the vine entirely and to the upper reaches of the window frame, where she took up residence.
From my reading, I suspect that the two sisters were involved in a standoff, which is not uncommon in mid to late August, as the females bellies become swollen with eggs. Witnessing this behavior in his laboratory, Fabre wondered if this were unique to confined females, or if it also occurred in the wild. Regardless, he kept his charges well-fed during this life stage, so that “should civil war break out, famine cannot be pleaded as the excuse.” Fabre’s description of this mysterious affair deserves reading:
At first, things go pretty well. The community lives in peace, each Mantis grabbing and eating whatever comes near her, without seeking strife with her neighbours. But this harmonious period does not last long. The bellies swell, the eggs are ripening in the ovaries, marriage and laying-time are at hand. Then a sort of jealous fury bursts out, although there is an entire absence of males who might be held reponsible for feminine rivalry. The working of the ovaries seems to pervert the flock, inspiring its members with a mania for devouring one another. There are threats, personal encounters, cannibal feasts. Once more, the spectral pose appears, the hissing of the wings, the fearsome gesture of the grapnels outstretched and uplifted in the air….
For no reason that I can gather, two neighbours suddenly assume their attitude of war. They turn their heads to the right and left, provoking each other, exchanging insulting glances. The “Puff! Puff!” of the wings rubbed by the abdomen sounds the charge….
Then one of the grapnels, with a sudden spring, shoots out to its full length and strikes the rival; it is no less abruptly withdrawn and resumes the defensive. The adversary hits back…. At the first blood drawn from her flabby paunch, or even before receiving the least wound, one of the duellists confesses herself beaten and retires. The other furls her battle-standard and does off elsewhither to mediate the capture of a Locust, keeping apparently calm, but ever ready to repeat the quarrel.
Very often, events take a more tragic turn. At such times, the full posture of the duels to the death is assumed. The murderous fore-arms are unfolded and raised in the air. Woe to the vanquished! The other seizes her in her vice and then and there proceeds to eat her, beginning at the neck, of course. —Fabre, J. Henri, The Life of the Grasshopper , 1917, pp. 138-140
If the green Mantis ever responded in kind — unfurling the fury of her battle regalia toward the brown Mantis — we missed it. To our observation, she never changed her prayerful pose, but instead moved carefully about the vine, her intent appearing to be no more complex than to keep a safe distance from the brown Mantis. During this fracas, she did something she never does — haplessly straying from the safety of her camouflage into bold sight, backdropped by tan brick.
An Inexplicable Peace
One July morning — long before the morning of the August spat — I’d gone out to the moonflower vine to spend a spell watching the green mantis. Until that morning, we were oblivious to the existence of the brown Mantis, even as we’d spent many long spells gazing into the leaves, tracing every inch of the vines trying to locate the well-camouflaged green Mantis.
Not so on this particular July morning. Right there, in plain sight, was the green Mantis, poised beside what appeared to be a molted skin, hanging upside-down from a stem. Curious, I was about to touch the skinwhen, to my shock, it moved! The skin quivered, as if being stroked by a small breeze, only there was none.
Looking closer, I realized that this was not the shed skin of the green Mantis, but a second Mantis, in the process of molting. I wondered, at the time, about the green Mantis’ presence. Not yet knowing any better, I wondered: Was this her mate?
Learning the answer to this question (“No”) only bred more questions — especially this: Why didn’t she just eat the brown Mantis?
Helpless and vulnerable, her molting sister couldn’t have been easier prey. It would have been effortless for the green one to reach over with a barbed hook and, yawn, snag the brown Mantis. Yet, she didn’t. Even more intriguing is this: If she wasn’t there to prey — as is the greatest supplication at this life stage of the Mantis — why was she there?
“Oh, the fierce beasts!” exclaimed Fabre. “They say dog does not eat dog. The Mantis has no scruples; she feasts on her fellows even when her favourite food, the cricket, is plentiful around her.” — Fabre, J. Henri, The Life of the Grasshopper , 1917, pp. 140-141.
While I acknowledge I may be projecting, there seemed to be an almost protective stance to her position. But why would she do this? I was unable to find the answer — not in the annals of Fabre, nor in more recent entomological studies. I only know that I’ve never again seen the two Mantises in such close proximity. Quite the contrary. Even before the morning of the spat, the two maintained fairly separate zones within the moonflower jungle.
My best guess is that, at that particular life stage — unlike the nymph stage, egg-laden stage, and the mating stage, all of which are prone to acts of cannibalism — there is some compulsion to preserve the species.
Alternately, there may be aspects of a Mantis’ nature, even if it’s nothing grander than the capacity for idle curiosity, that cannot be seen or measured, no matter how precisely laid the scalpel; no matter how sensitive the instrument. The tool has yet to be devised, for instance, that can quantify the existence of the human soul, much less qualify it. The same may be true of any creature on the earth. We just don’t know.
The Animal That Prays to God
The subjects of Fabre’s lab, Mantis religiosa, were known to the country folk as lou Prego-Dieu, which translates to “the animal that prays to God.” Fabre seemed somewhat amused by their naiveté on the habits of the Mantis.
Peasants are not particular about resemblances. They saw a stately-looking insect standing majestically on the sun-grilled grasses. They noticed her large delicate green wings hanging about her like a linen veil and her front feet, her hands so to speak, raised to heaven as if she prayed. That was enough for them; the thickets were peopled with prophetesses and nuns in prayer! — Fabre, J. Henri, The Life of the Grasshopper , 1917, pp. 113-114.
Humans seem to have been similarly named. The nomenclature, Homo sapiens, or ” wise man” presumes much. While it is true that, compared to other animals, our brains allow us specific capacities for abstract reasoning, language, artistic expression and a sophisticated use of tools, the term, “wise” implies that we, as a species, have somehow been elevated from the thick-skulled constraints of Homo erectus — as if there were more than window-dressing to our ability to wear a fine pair of trousers as we march off to war.
This is some of what I’ve been pondering this summer while watching the enchanting beasts on the moonflower vine, backdropped as they were by the unfolding carnage of human warfare. The politicians, the profiteers and their propagandists have been hard at work, issuing from their chambers and boardrooms the pious rituals of war; their pomp and circumstance always preceded in prayer, their jagged mandibles poised to pontificate and prey upon humanity.
Witnessing this has been, as Fabre wrote, “beyond the wildest dreams of the most horrible imagination. I have seen it done with my own eyes, and have not yet recovered from my astonishment.”
As centuries of recorded human thought can attest, we humans are evolved creatures. We can hardly blame our brutalities on instinct. Here, the Mantis poses a rhetorical question for us all. It could be that Homo sapiens are simply endowed with different measures of wisdom. The same may very well be true of the Mantis which, in my mind, I’ve adequately explained.
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Epilogue: The Following Spring
There was more to the summer story of the Mantises, but I didn’t have the heart to tell it just yet. Shortly after finishing the above article, the suitors arrived. The last time we saw the green Mantis, she was with her sweetheart. The two of them had chosen, of all places, to become engaged in the middle of the tan brick wall. Lovely green Mantis, tan wall. We never saw her again.
The brown Mantis, on the other hand, lived out her entire natural life, which lasted through the month of September. She left behind two egg cases, each one neatly camouflaged in the mortar alleys between the brick.
Today, a tiny being with legs not much larger than the hair on a human arm sprung into our lives. It arrived seemingly out of nowhere, within just a few feet from the old moonflower vines, and landed midway down my son-in-law’s terminal grapnel.
