Local fauna

I was in the front yard today watering a newly planted bush and looking at a nearby rosemary bush, wondering if the gardener had sprayed it with anything that might make it a bad idea for me to use a sprig to season some corn on the cob tonight when...

I noticed a half-inch long praying mantis. How I picked it out from a few feet away is beyond me, but there it was. It's hard to see it in the pictures, but here is one (I circled the mantis in the second copy).

I'm assuming this was an immature specimen because of its size.

When I was a kid, my dad experimented with organic farming. He ordered a few crates of lady bugs to deal with weevils in our alfalfa fields: we'd load the crates on the back of a pickup and drive through the fields, shaking the crates to release the lady bugs.

He also bought some praying mantis egg cases that we put in our backyard garden.

Since then, though, I've never seen a mantis in the "wild," so it was pretty cool spotting one today.

I did a little research and learned that praying mantises are related to cockroaches (I hope they eat them because they're everywhere in Vegas). Mantises are pretty wicked predators... they've been known to catch and eat hummingbirds and... mice!