I could have shelved this one for another Estate Find, but that’s a week away and I think I should keep you in the loop.
I had a feeling this was looming, yet did my check a little too late in the day to catch anything in progress – still, we have this.
That’s the egg case/ootheca of a Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis) that we saw in an earlier, not-quite-Estate-Find, only now displaying the chaff that indicates the new arrival of the bebbies. When I first approached, they were clustered on the branches immediately adjacent to the ootheca, but quickly dispersed even though I didn’t draw too close until I had the camera in hand. Well, most of them dispersed.
One was watching me from apparent safety, hoping I wouldn’t notice, which isn’t just wishful thinking: these guys are at most 10mm in length. A casual, or even a mildly observant, glance could easily miss them even though there were dozens on hand.
But in a few places, the leaves looked like they were covered in fine debris – still easy to miss if this failed to strike the viewer as atypical, or if they didn’t watch long enough to realize that the debris was moving a bit too much. Note that this was after a large number of them panicked at my approach and scampered down the branches or simply dropped to the lawn below. We’ll go in for a closer look on this frame, though:
That’s an even dozen, counting the one at top that remains hidden behind the leaf except for its arms beseeching the heavens. I have only past experience to go on, but I’m pegging these as eight hours old at most, probably less.
The light was quite bright, so while I was using the typical macro rig (mostly,) the lighting looks much more natural and not that nighttime spotlight appearance so typical of macro flash work. This is because the exposure setting for the flash still allowed the background to be exposed properly enough to look balanced – nice when you can get it to work.
Meanwhile, I was shifting very carefully since so many of them had dropped to the lawn underneath the sapling (which really only sprouted leaves this past week,) and the danger of crushing them was high. They’re pretty good about fleeing, however, so moving slowly and attempting to clear the area before squatting or sitting down works pretty well. Did I manage to avoid all of them? I doubt it, to be honest, but I did what I could, and it really is impressive watching how quickly they can take themselves from harm’s way. I even saw two damselflies make close passes, though I suspect they were only dueling over territory and not hunting, but the mantids dropped away instantaneously at the perceived threat – those tiny eyes are sharp.
Still, I remained too nervous and wasn’t catching any actual hatching action anyway, so this was the last set of images I took – I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity when one was posing so nicely on these unidentified flowers (which I’m not looking up since I’m trying to get this out on the same day.) I’ll keep checking because there are often late hatchers that appear later, but I think I missed those details this year. I’ve gotten them before, so no biggie.