Pleased to eat you

Lots of praying mantis around at the moment. By an evolutionary quirk the female will sometimes snack on the diminutive male after mating. Apparently it gives her brood more protein but you can understand why Mr Mantis might be a bit backward in coming forward. A whole storehouse of jokes to be conjured here.

An ungainly creature at the best of time, all legs and arms, it fossicks about when disturbed and then takes up its stillness position. Some are green and some are brown, which may depend on their predominant contextual vegetation. If so this one was way off beam in a lovely but now pretty much dead box bush.