Baby Mantis

These last couple of days, I noticed these weird ant-like bugs crawling around the outside of the house. They're black and about the size of a large ant (~1cm). But when you look closely, you'll notice the front legs are more like a mantis and their fat abdomen is actually a long skinny abdomen that's curled up ... So I did a quick search, and sure enough, these are mantis nymphs, it's pretty cool how they disguise themselves as black ants like that, it must help them survive...

Cool Insects

Just a few shots of some cool bugs I found while out on a macro photography run around the house. I'll spare you the spiders this time, instead I have this cool grasshopper. He was tiny but I caught him resting on a basil leaf and got this shot.

Tiny but colorful little fella.

Later, as I was showing Clo some weird fungus spores under a leaf, we both jumped as this guy started moving. We didn't see him at all, yet he was huge, about 15-20cm long !

Stick-insect (Mantid)

Can you spot him ?

Double-Barred Finch

These little guys have been become regulars over the past few weeks when the big birds aren't around. They eat the smaller seeds that the parrots don't seem to like as much, so they're a great addition to our little garden ecosystem.

They're tiny, so much so that gravity doesn't seems to affect them in flight, they just flutter lightly from once place to another. I like them because they look like they've had their face painted.

Not a great picture, but it gives an idea of the size of these little birds

Bye bye!