Is That a Stick?

As I was walking beside my pickup this morning I saw what I thought was a stick on the hood.  I casually picked it up to throw it into the grass when it moved and I saw that it wasn't a stick at all, but an insect.




I hadn't seen one of these curious insects for a couple of years and I hoped that they weren't gone from these parts.  How something living could look so dead, so slender, so wood-like is a mystery.  So good is its mimicry that it sways as a stick would with the wind blowing it.  Any bird that catches one of these walking sticks has a sharp eye, for certain.

 According to National Geographic, there are over 3,000 species of them, varying in size from a few inches to one in Borneo that is 13 inches long.  Until I read about them, I had no idea there were that many.   In my experience with them from my childhood until now, they seemed pretty much alike.

All walking sticks are herbivores and in the US they seem to prefer blackberry leaves. As far as I know they don't destroy large amounts of plant leaves. They are of the Phasmatodea order, in Greek meaning phantom or apparition - an apt name since they seem to materialize from stick to living insect.

This photo shows the head of the walking stick.

This is the tail and what appears to be pincers.  I carefully handled it and it didn't use it as a defense.  Maybe it could be an ovipositor or used when mating.  





 This is the full view of the walking stick insect.
 (Remember, click on the photo to enlarge it.)

Tragedy at the Wren's Nest

Before, I kept you posted on the baby wrens in the hanging basket.  Yesterday morning before daylight I planned to take a picture of them in their nest, but I was surprised to see it empty, since I knew they were too young to fledge.

At about the same time I notice something on the window sill near the basket.  It was a king snake.  There were three bulges in its body, which were the baby birds.

I captured the snake and put it in a half-gallon jar to study it.  Indeed, it was a king snake, about two feet long.  These are some photos I took:

I was very angry and upset that the snake had eaten the babies that I had grown close to, but when I cooled down, I realized that the king snake was just doing what its nature dictated.

This set me to thinking. We tend to anthropomorphize - assign human characteristics to animals - because we live in a society where some things are wrong and need addressing, but to the snake it was a bonanza find - three helpless babies that would satiate it for a month or more.

We humans do things that are far worse than a snake following its nature.   We take infant calves from their mothers, put them in a dark stall with no room to move about because their muscles would develop and their meat wouldn't be tender, force them to stand or lie in their excrement and feed them nothing but cow's milk, which results in scours for their entire miserable lives.

When they are mercifully killed and sent to the supermarket, where they are cut into steaks, wrapped in innocuous plastic and labeled "veal," we are distanced from its plight. We hire others to do the business of processing.  Don't get me wrong - I eat meat, but I don't eat veal because of the inhumane manner in which it is forced to spend it's short life.

My first thought was to kill the snake, thereby avenging the baby birds, but I knew that would be wrong.  No animal is "mean" by our definition, so I carried it over to some woods a good distance from my house and I let it go.  Had it been a copperhead or a rattlesnake, I'm not what I would do.

Hey, Were You Raised in a Barn?

My niece, Carolyn, emailed me this picture of a bird's nest that is in one of her father's out buildings.  She was wondering if I knew what kind of bird made it.  Since I haven't seen the adult, I'm not sure, but from the looks of it - mud and grass and twigs, I'd say it is a barn swallow.  The nests I saw pictured on the internet were almost identical to the one here, 

Like many other birds, they build nests that are quite secure from snakes, cats, and other predators.

The barn swallow, Hirundo rustica,  is a beautiful, streamlined bird with a long forked tail.  They are built for fast, quick-turning maneuvers in order to catch flying insects.  Since they are flying insect  catchers, they are very valuable to us.

The barn swallow is the national bird of Austria.  Somehow I thought the cuckoo might be.