Luckily, I’m not the one to do it.
I was busy with other tasks this morning and neglected to do my morning check of the mantis egg sacs, but judging from how many were swarming around when I finally did notice this one, they’d probably gotten started in the very early morning hours. Only a couple were still displaying a slight forehead bump that’s the last
It’s almost 4 AM right now, and don’t ask me about my sleep schedule. But yesterday evening (as in, about seven hours ago,) I checked on the mantis egg sacs in the yard because I know they’re due – actually overdue, going by previous years. Nothing was happening then, so as I stepped out this morning at 3-ish I only glanced down at the nearest one in passing, since it sits
… and of course someone snuck in.
In this case, it was the first of the mantis egg cases (oothecas) hatching. There are several in the yard, including four now that had been naturally placed there – three Chinese mantids and a Carolina. I was doing routine checks, but the last one discovered, deep under an untended thicket of mostly vines, I now realize that
Yes, indeedy, it’s the 2,000th post here on Walkabout! And it actually would have been here a little bit sooner, but I decided that I was going to feature something for it, which required finishing a long-standing project, and I have now. That’s all explained in the podcast, because yeah, it had to be a podcast too.
Walkabout podcast – Two Thousand
Just for the record, it’s
So as I said last year, I was endeavoring to photograph a Chinese mantis creating an egg sac, or ootheca, and never managed it. Actually, in all my years of chasing hexapods, I’ve done it just once – one lousy frame. Last fall, I had a likely candidate
So here we have the… second? Is that right? Holy shit, that’s bad… podcast of 2020, kinda pathetic but whatcha gonna do: withhold your payments? Yeah, that’s right, sit down and hush up.
This time though, we’re going into improvements. No, not improvements that have been made, but improvements that will be made. Maybe. Hopefully. Soon… ish…
It’s actually
The other morning Buggato and I did a photo outing to the head of the Neuse River in Raleigh, an area called ‘Falls of the Neuse’ even though the falls have been replaced by a dam and spillway now. We hadn’t been down there in a while, and figured this was a decent time, but hadn’t counted on the flow being higher than normal, which prevented wading across to other photo
That title’s an homage to a coworker of mine from history back, who described a spider in that manner and sparked a bizarre mental image…
So around Walkabout Studios, as I said earlier, are arranged several egg sacs (“oothecas”) of Chinese mantises (Tenodera sinensis,) specifically so I can photograph them in various life stages, including hatching. Along for the
As the previous post indicated, we get our warm spells, which mostly bring rain, but then again, there’s a chance of snow predicted for Thursday night. It will almost certainly be trivial and not worth photographing, but that’s what conditions are like right now.
Today (as I type this, though it will certainly post the following day,) I had the first serious free time in a week or so
And so, we rejoin our hero in his further adventures of spider encounters and arachnophobia…
When I did the detailed portraits of a largish wolf spider (family Lycosidae) a few days back, I released it under the porch steps and vowed to keep an eye open. Accommodatingly, the spider assisted
