Posted on 06/16/2017 4:12:18 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The rare photograph reveals a grisly backyard scene—and the intense appetite of mantises.
While praying mantises aren’t the target visitors for a hummingbird feeder, a startling photo shows that they might come around anyway—but not for the sugar water.
Several years ago, New Mexico resident and former National Park Service ranger Tom Vaughan spotted a bizarre sight at a backyard bird feeder: a dead hummingbird in the clutches of a praying mantis, the insect feeding on the bird’s carcass.
Nibbling on one hummingbird clearly wasn’t enough for the ravenous mantis. “After this shot, the mantis dropped the bird, crawled across the underside of the plastic feeder, came up on the other side and prepared to nab another hummer,” Vaughan wrote in a June 4 Facebook comment describing the photograph.
Mantises are surprisingly ferocious insects; scientists have previously seen them attacking and feasting on a variety of hummingbird species. Although it has happened before, it is rarely caught on camera. “It was probably what we would call a lucky shot,” says Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in Ithaca, NY.
The photograph is so remarkable, in fact, that it will be included in an upcoming publication about the predation of birds by praying mantises in The Wilson Journal of Ornithology, according to a statement Vaughan posted to Facebook on June 4.
INSATIABLE INSECTS
McGowan notes he has seen mantises stalking hummingbird feeders before, but has never witnessed an attack. Anecdotal accounts of these insects devouring hummingbirds are brutal: Mantises have been seen impaling the chest of the bird, dangling it by its legs, or in the case of this photo, grabbing it by the skull and feeding on its head.
Other descriptions of mantises eating hummingbirds note that the insect usually starts by grabbing the bird at the neck, surprising it while it is feeding on a flower or at a feeder.
Once the bird is subdued, the mantis slowly nibbles along the neckline and keeps at it for hours until most of the flesh is gone. “They have to chew through all that fluff, so I’m not surprised they go for the head,” McGowan adds.
Hummingbirds are likely the only birds that a mantis would be able to catch: “Hummingbirds are tiny, five or six grams—less than a nickel,” McGowan says, adding that mantises are about the same size.
Only about four inches long, mantises have also been known to ambush mice, feast on lizards, and violently cannibalize members of their own species. Generally, though, their meals of choice are other smaller insects, especially pollinating insects such as bees.
In fact, McGowan says that hummingbirds’ pollinator-like knack for buzzing around and sipping nectar may well make them all the more attractive to mantises. “If you act like a bee and you’re in those places, that starts to put you at risk for getting hit by a predator,” he says.
Do not even talk about Mantis sex...
You’ll lose your head.
“I have beheaded a few standing on my bird feeder”
Do you like to dress up as a mantis too, while standing there on your bird feeder beheading hummingbirds?
(I couldn’t resist)
I have seen this with my own eyes a few years ago right in my garden—unfortunately, before I had a digital camera.
“I have beheaded a few standing on my bird feeder”
Do you like to dress up as a mantis too, while standing there on your bird feeder beheading hummingbirds?
(I couldn’t resist)
_____________________
No he dresses as a Islamic and uses a sword. after dressing the mantis in orange.
I thought someone would post that.
Here on Van Isle I have lots of Anna’s, a couple of Calliopes, but that’s about it.
Several of the Anna’s overwinter here. It’s really neat to have a hummer coming up to the feeder when there is 3” of snow on the ground.
They’re fine brave little birds. I’ve been able to get them to land on my finger occasionally.
That’s funny. I have Japanese beetles and praying mantises and the mantises don’t touch the beetles. I tried to tease a mantis into eating a beetle - took about five minutes before the mantis speared it - then it tasted it and frantically shook it off its claw - yuck! yuck! yuck!
I knock the beetles into water and then crush them. For a few days the ants clean up the beetles and then they get sick of them and leave them alone.
At the end of the season when the mantises are big enough to take a hummingbird I transport them away from the garden - but they have wings in that last molt.
too funny.
That first Mantis looks like he is mimicking a flower to fool his prey. Cool.
Good eye. That is an orchid mantis. Google that up and search images to see an amazing array. Too bad they aren’t native to the US.
Bruce Lee would beat his azz...
One day I saw a hummer hanging upside down off a branch. Went out to check and a praying mantis had it upside down. My feeders were hanging off of wood planks and had them hanging off the feeders like the photos. Got rid of the wood planks and haven’t had a problem since.
Ping - regarding recent gardening thread on hummingbirds
I used to catch these all the time in Oregon.
I haven’t actually seen one in years.
Was wondering if they died off in the area. I used to see them all the time.
One of the buildings where I worked, BP Campus Naperville, Il, attracted hundreds of mantises. IIRC in late summer.
Nothing unusual in the building, pilot plants for the oil industry. Many buildings like it, but they only went to the one building?
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