Author: Seabrooke

There haven’t been many moths to my light the last few times I’ve set it out, even on the warmer, humid evenings. Something to do with the weather, maybe? The almost-drought from earlier this summer? I dunno. But what I did have a lot of one night were these guys. Praying mantises. At the point that I finally shut the light off and went to bed, well after midnight, I’d managed to attract 13 of them. Several clung to the sheet, others clambered up the log wall, one or two walked along the ground below the light. Equal numbers of both green and brown. I never saw any of them stalking (or holding) prey, though they did occasionally turn their heads to watch a moth walk by… like this one is doing. I love how mobile their heads are.

I did a post about praying mantises a couple of years ago, the first summer we moved here. They’re abundant in our fields, and late August through September seems to be when the adults start taking wing. Which is mostly when I notice them. Mantises go through a simple metamorphosis, meaning that the larval/nymph stages look very similar to the adults, but without wings. Grasshoppers, walking-sticks, and some others also do this. You might not immediately realize that what you have isn’t an adult if you found one. But in the autumn they moult into their last instar, the adult stage, and finally have wings.

I nearly always detect them by flushing them as I walk through the field, or by noticing them fly in to a spot near me. You can’t really tell the long, narrow body shape while they’re in flight, but they’ve got very distinctive wings: pale and sheer, like pieces of tissue paper. Even on overcast days, something about the nature of the wings makes them look permanently backlit. Once you know what to look for, it’s really easy to identify a mantis in flight. (I should see if I could get a photo of one flying when I’m out this week.)

I’d never had any come to my moth light before. So I was a little surprised to have 13 turn up. There are a number of species in North America, but the most common one, at least that I encounter, is the European Mantis, Mantis religiosa. It’s the one with the black-and-white spots on its inner “arms”. It’s been here over a century and has become pretty widespread in the northeast and the west (the prairies and the southeast don’t seem to have them yet).

Another introduced species, the Chinese Mantis, Tenodera aridifolia, is found through much of the east. Like the European Mantis, it has both a green and a brown form, but it lacks the spots on its arms. Beyond that one field mark I don’t actually know how to tell the two apart. Naturally, none of my photos show the inner arm well enough to tell if it’s got a spot on it or not. I think possibly the adult Chinese Mantises always have a bold spring-green stripe down the outer edge of the adult’s wing cover, even in the brown form, and maybe a slightly longer “torso”… but that’s just based on comparing photos on BugGuide. If that’s the case, these would all be European Mantises.

My Kaufman Guide to Insects notes, under Chinese Mantis, “Both sexes fly well and come to lights at night in search of prey”, but this seems also to apply to European Mantises (according to a quick Google search) and a few other native species.

Dan really outdid himself with the gift he brought me this afternoon. He walked into my study holding a large black-and-yellow butterfly and asked, “Is this a Giant Swallowtail?”

It was indeed. He’d caught it while it fluttered lazily at the phlox in our garden. What makes this noteworthy is this:

We’re at the tip of the red arrow, roughly.

The one and only time I’ve ever seen this species was a number of years ago, perhaps 2005. It was visiting my mom’s garden at my parents’ old house in the Greater Toronto Area. The species is very rare in Ontario; it occurs regularly in small numbers in southwestern Ontario, but the farther east you go the rarer it seems to become. Of course, it doesn’t breed out this way, so all occurrences of the butterfly here are immigrants that either traveled here under their own steam or were blown here in a weather system. The Canadian Biodiversity Information Facility has a species page for Giant Swallowtail, on which they note, “In 1992, a stray was recorded in the Ottawa area for the first time following high winds resulting from a hurricane in the southern U.S.” Could today’s visitor have ridden up ahead of Irene?

These are beautiful big butterflies. They fly as if their oversized wings are too big to flap properly, like floppy clowns’ shoes. They float lazily in the air, never traveling very high, cruising from one spot to another with what appears to be hardly any effort at all. Dan said when he first saw it above the garden he initially thought it was a falling leaf.

They also have the distinct habit of fluttering while they visit flowers. I took a couple of photos of it in Dan’s hand then had him release it. It stuck around the garden and I followed it about, camera in hand, trying to get a good photo as it resumed feeding on the phlox, but it wouldn’t stop fluttering. In fact, it seemed to use its wings to push its head deep into the throat of the flower. Judging by the blurred wings I see in many of the photos on Google Image search, this wasn’t unique to our butterfly.

Down south, in its breeding range, this species is considered a pest of citrus orchards, especially oranges which has earned its caterpillars the name of “Orange Dogs”. It’ll also feed on Hop Tree (Ptelea trifoliata) and Prickly-ash (Zanthoxylum americanum) where citrus trees aren’t common, such as up here (though both species actually in the same family as oranges and other citrus). I don’t think we’ve got Hop Trees here, but we certainly have lots of Prickly-ash about. I wonder if their range might expand, or if it’s not the availability of food plants that limits its northern distribution, but rather something like average winter temperatures or snowfall affecting overwintering survival.

My camera’s battery died after I’d run off a dozen shots, and since it seemed to be hanging about the garden and not going anywhere I hurried in to grab my spare. But when I returned, it’d disappeared, presumably off into the meadow somewhere. Safe travels, buddy, and thanks for visiting!