Looking Into an Owl

 It was, if not an exactly typical morning in our household, not a terribly unusual one. Bill had just left for work when the phone rang. I know this means there's something to report, whether a turtle saved or a rare bird spotted or a fox crossing, or a roadkill that mustn't be missed. It turned out to be the last one.

 A barred owl had gotten hit while flying across the road not far from our house. Bummer, big bummer. Bill knew I'd want to examine it, and I did. I threw my camera over my pajamas and grabbed Liam, who was home from school for parent-teacher conference day, also in his PJ's, and jumped in the car. Time is of the essence with roadkills, because you don't want them to get any squasheder than they already are.

We were pretty late, by which I mean that owl was flat, and so was the pickerel frog he'd been carrying when he was hit. 

He had to have gotten the frog earlier, because it had been a dry night and there was no way a pickerel frog would have been moving out on the road. So I guessed that he'd just swooped too low as he crossed the road (owls do that) and gotten hit.

As soon as I started moving the owl around, looking at it, louseflies swarmed up out of its plumage, looking for a new, preferably live, host.

These bloodsucking flies found on raptors are flat and hard and quick, and they have excellent eyesight, being attracted to motion. The quick, rather than the dead. One landed on my arm and I couldn't blow it off--I had to grab it and throw it, and it circled and came back. Ecccch. It can't live on human protein, but it was hungry. Lousefly don't care. He's hungry.

Now, here's where it gets kind of gross, but fascinating. So if you're easily grossed out, and don't want to find out what the owl had been eating, just quit with this poignant feather photo and email a friend who also reads this blog to ask what the owl had been eating. But I know you're gonna look, because if you're that easily grossed out, you've either just started reading this blog and don't know what to expect, or you've left me a long time ago. Because the nature I know and love isn't all soft and pretty. And the stuff that isn't so pretty is usually more interesting, and it's what makes my canary chirp.

Ready?

I turned the owl over and found a bunch of what looked like plant material. My first thought was that the poor late owl might have been starving, because louse flies are usually more numerous on a bird that's otherwise compromised. Owls don't eat grass. What is all this green stuff? Huh?

I leaned closer, gagging a little, and yep, it looked like grass. I couldn't make heads or tails of it. But I knew I had to move the carcass off the road. And as I picked the owl up and slapped at the darn louseflies, a bolus fell out of what had been the stomach.

 Weird. More grass. More plant parts. What could be going on with this bird?

Being a Science Chimp, I had to know. So I picked at the stuff and what do you know? A praying mantis foreleg (far right) appeared in the mess.

 And then it all made sense. This owl had been eating praying mantises, and probably a lot of katydids, both of which are at peak abundance right now. And the green I was seeing was their wing covers, and the amber stuff was their membranous wings. Wow. That is a LOT of praying mantises. I'd guess 30 or 40 based on all the wing covers and legs I found.

 With delight, I imagined this beautiful little owl (it was very small, probably a male) swooping low over the goldenrod tops, picking off mantids and katydids with its yellow feet. And I wished hard that he was still doing that. But this owl had made his last big mistake, so I dropped him off into the weeds well off the road to return to the meadow and turned for home, with one thoroughly agog eleven-year-old who decided he would not be having sausage and eggs for breakfast after all.

Instead of getting soft and pretty, my day got weirder, but that's another roadkill post, isn't it?

An Arabesque Orb Weaver, hanging in the guardrail, made me feel a little better about it all. If life gives you roadkill, look at the stomach contents. You might learn something.

Mantisfly and Wolf Spider-A Terrible Tango

Mantisfly - Dicromantispa sayi

Another treasure of the garden--a mantisfly. These little gems are not terribly common, and I'm glad to find one every few years. I found this one floundering in my little water garden and saved it by putting it on some petunias to dry out. Predatory, as its spined and grasping front legs would suggest, the mantisfly is a neuropteran, related to the predatory lacewings, and like them it flies reluctantly and weakly. Actually, it prefers to wait around on flowers for something to blunder by to be grabbed and eaten. Me too. But usually I wind up cooking instead.

Such a charming bug--tiny but outfitted with everything it needs to grab smaller insects, process and consume them. I'm amazed at the convergent evolution that gives this insect the same bug-eyed countenance and miraculous forelimbs of the big praying mantis. Just a real good preying apparatus, and it works for both mantids and the unrelated mantisflies.

 

There, the similarities end. And the story gets weirder, as it usually does with insects.   Larval mantisflies, which are speedy and flattened and look something like beetle larvae, parasitize spiders and their eggs. They hitch a ride on a female spider, like a wolf spider, and get into the egg sac while it's under construction. They suck the eggs dry with tubular mouthparts, then pupate in the nice strong silk egg sac. When they pupate, the adult emerges by chewing its way out of the egg sac. Wow.

Dicromantispa sayi, one of six North American species in its subfamily Mantispinae, has a wide range, from southern Ontario west to SD, Utah, NE and AZ, and south to FL, Mexico and Panama, the Bahamas and Cuba.Worldwide, there are about 400 species of mantisfly. Think about that for a moment. It's a little crazy when you think about it, and compare insect diversity to, say, mammalian or avian diversity. That's like saying there are 400 species of oh, say, gnatcatcher worldwide.

So when you see a big scary spider, know that there's something much scarier haunting it, and cut it a break. This, according to Eric Eaton of BugEric on Blogspot, is a fishing spider, genus Dolomedes, family Pisauridae. What it's doing on a dry ridge with two nearly-dry, fishless streams on either side is anybody's guess. Headed for my goldfish pond, hoping to snag a half-pound snack?

                             
I posted the photo above thinking I had a wolf spider. Below is a real wolf spider. And this is the one I hope you'll cut some slack. Because if the wolf spider had been able to hatch all its eggs in its carefully tended silken sac, which the female spider hauls around beneath her abdomen, you'd have seen something like this:

which we at first thought was a very fluffy wolf spider but which, upon closer inspection, resolved into THIS

 which I'm sure many people consider a Fear Factor moment, being covered in your own squirmy seething chillun'. I found it charming. So as much as I love finding mantisflies around, I'm thankful on the wolf spiders' behalf that there aren't a lot more of them.

Thanks to my friend Eric Eaton and the folks at Bugguide.net for helping me narrow down the choices of mantisfly. And for helping me tell a fishing spider from a wolf spider!

A Slow Surrender to Winter

Here's Liam's first published photo. Not bad for a ten-year-old, freezin' in his dinosaur jammies while he takes a picture of his mama.


photo by Liam Thompson. I'm about to toss them all on the compost pile. Cold front coming.

I don't know who listens to All Things Considered on Christmas Day. I don't. I'm too busy laying around and eating altogether too much and the wrong things and then playing Wii Fit and finding out I should be 14 pounds lighter and faster on my feet, or Japanese, whichever comes first. I'm betting on turning Japanese.

One of my new commentaries aired today. It's about hauling dying plants and praying mantises inside when I really shouldn't. You can listen to it on NPR's web site.

If the player doesn't work, hit "Download" and it'll give you an MP3 that does. That worked for me.
Or you can just read the transcript below.

But I kind of like the idea to talking to you over your 'puterbox. I miss you. I know, I'm taking a break. But I do.

A Slow Surrender to Winter

The sky couldn’t be heavier, lower, grayer, weepier. It’s 38, going for low in the 20’s. It’s winter, winter, winter. And I still have blooming flowers in baskets and containers on the front porch. Geraniums, lobelias, blue marguerite; plectranthus that when you brush its leaves, smells like a lime margarita.

Sure, they’re a bit brown, nipped around the edges, but the geraniums are blooming, shocking pink, red, magenta, like there’s no tomorrow. And for them, there isn’t. Unless…

I keep bringing them inside. I pile them up in the foyer and they weep leaves and dirt and petals that track all over the house. They block the closet doors. I can’t keep them inside, but I can’t leave them out to freeze. So I shuttle them in at night and out during the day, groaning with the effort. I’ve brought them this far. How can I sentence them to death?

blue margeurite on the compost pile, sighhh

But there’s a string of nights in the 20’s coming up, teens, even, and sooner or later I’ll have to say good-bye to summer for good. There’s something about looking out the kitchen window on blooming baskets of flowers that feels increasingly wrong. These bright jolts of color are somehow unseemly, when everything else is dead. And it's not just the plants that are dying.

Three times in my life, I’ve found a big praying mantis staggering weakly around my garden after the first light frost, and I’ve taken her—it’s invariably a female—inside. I set her up on a big potted plant where she sits regally all day, a weird alien pet, watching snowflakes drift down on the roses outside the window, where she once lived. I do this, knowing it’s wrong, but unable to leave her dying outside. I feed her crickets and mealworms, spray the leaves down with water, watch as she grabs and stabs, delicately dines; bends to drink droplets from the leaves, grooms her forearms and feet like a little otherworldly cat.

She turns her head to watch me when I walk into the room, holds out her spiked forelimbs to ask if she might ride on my arm to another plant, to sit in a spot of winter sun. This goes on until late January, February. I get entirely too attached. And then, like Goldie Hawn in “Death Becomes Her,” she begins to decay. First it’s an antenna, then a foot, then a lower leg, simply falling off. And then she loses her balance and falls, and busts off a forearm. And I see why mantids are meant to die with the first hard frost, and it’s brought home to me why I should never have brought her inside.

So it goes with the geraniums. I have to let them die. Tomorrow. Or maybe this weekend, with a light snowfall for their funeral shroud. Oh, the intractable human heart. It does this every year.

Hope you had a peaceful Christmas. We did.