Ode to Oothecae

I discovered a surprise in my garden last weekend, and with a little research and a little more searching of the garden, my surprise has turned into pure delight.

Delight, I have found thee, and thy name is Ootheca.

As I was walking around the garden with our Brittany Spaniel, or more accurately as I was being pulled around the garden by our manic Brittany Spaniel, the bright winter sun caught the structure pictured to the right just enough to make it sparkle and catch my eye.  It was attached to a cane of the winter-bare red stems of  'Therese Bugnet', one of my longest-grown rugosa hybrids. I was examining the rose closely to see how its structure was revealed by its temporary lack of leaves.  And there it was, a pale brown, misshapen honey-comb-like structure that looked like it would flake away weightless at the slightest touch. 

Isn't it marvelous that, on a visceral level, all gardeners will instinctively recognize this thing, this unplantlike structure, as something related to or made by an insect?  What otherworldly factor does it have that says "not mammal," "not plant," and "not natural," and leaves us at "insect"?  That single certitude was enough to start me off in the right direction to investigate and determine to my joy that it was an ootheca, an entirely new term in my vocabulary. "Ootheca" (pronounced ˌō-ə-ˈthē-kə) is derived from the latinized "oo", meaning egg, and Greek "theca", meaning cover, literally translating to an "egg case."  From my brief research, I quickly learned that only a few creatures, primarily cockroaches, the praying mantis family, and mollusks, create proteinaceous oothecae to provide protection for the embryos of the next generation.  And since I was not near a stream, nor did I feel it likely that a cockroach would have climbed up my rose bush to lay this thing, I concluded that it must be from one of the 1800 worldwide species of the Mantis order, best known by the collective "praying mantis" moniker.

Now, the question might be, which Mantis?  There are websites available to aid in the identification of these egg capsules, but with literally hundreds of possibilities and complicated by the fact that I don't have a PhD in insect identification, I'll probably never know the exact species present on my roses.  It is enough for me to know that they are present, biding their time, in my garden.  To a gardener, finding evidence that future generations of praying mantis will inhabit and protect your garden is a blessing equivalentto finding gold flakes in a stream in your backyard.

After searching more rose bushes and then over the rest of my garden, I found numerous other examples of oothecae around the garden. One of the more curious is the smaller and more symmetrically neat structure pictured at the left and below, found perfectly placed in the ear canal of a concrete greyhound statue.  Another mantis species, or something else?

Despite finding Internet instructions to raise the little critters by hand however, my curiosity does not extend to trying to hurry along Mother Nature.  I'm quite content to await the chitinous inhabitants of the garden as they appear in their own good time, secure in the knowledge that it's all part of the life cycle of my garden. 

Prairie Camouflage

I believe that some of the most fascinating aspects of Flint Hills gardening have been the examples of local fauna adaptation that are everywhere around me, hiding alongside the prairie grasses.  I could wax long and hard on the invisibility of the various prairie snakes that tend to announce their presence at the best possible moment to give me heart palpitations.  But I'm not going to because I have deeply suppressed those memories of brief panics that make me a serious contender for the Olympic high jump. No, I'd like to present a couple of unique and more cuddly creatures of the prairie ecosystem.

One delight of gardening in Kansas is the stealthy appearance of the stately Praying Mantis.  From my childhood in Indiana, I was sure that the Praying Mantis was always light green, a green that made it invisible among the plants in my father's garden.  I would have bet that the Praying "Manti" of Kansas would be green as well, perhaps the exact green of big bluestem or Indian grass, but obviously I didn't know better.  In reality, the Mantis in Kansas has evolved to be present in greatest numbers in the Fall, when insect populations here have reached their peak, and they are not green, but are simply brown.  The brown of drying Fall prairie grass.  A brown tone mixed with the brown  color and the pattern of the dust that fills the air during the heat and droughts of summer.  I actually transferred the Mantis (I don't know the exact species) pictured at the right from the tall grass to the brick wall of my house simply so that it could photographed.  I'd never even have found it in the grass if it hadn't moved as I reached forward to fondle a Miscanthus seedhead.

If there were an award for camouflage, however, I'd give it to the Common Nighthawk (Chordeiles minor).  Below, you can see a female Nighthawk who chose to nest a few summers back in the mulch surrounding a walnut tree in my yard.  Nowhere in my yard was there a better background for it to choose to hide against during mid-summer than that mulch and the flint rock surrounding it.  And it was obviously planning well, for behind it, if you look closely one of the things that looks like a rock is a Nighthawk chick, invisible against the mulch except for the beady little black eyes.  That chick and two other siblings survived an entire month after hatching, flat out in the open front yard, surrounded by predators both on the ground (my bird-loving Brittany Spaniel and a pair of cats, as well as hungry coyotes and sneaking snakes) and in the air (owls at night and Red-tail hawks during the day).  In reality, the biggest danger to this cute little ball of fluff was likely my lawn-mower, because during mowing, the chicks would run out into the grass, moving back and forth as I mowed next to the mulch.  I spent an entire month waiting for a horrendous little "pffft" and a tuft of feathers from the lawn mower deck, but somehow these little creatures survived all the hideous noise and the machinery that helps me keep the snake population down in the immediacy of my surroundings. 

Nature is sometimes incredibly brilliant in its designs and methods, is it not?