Mike in the Wild

Bugs are something to reliably count on seeing every summer evening in Prescott, at least for now.  Luckily they're usually not the annoying ones: houseflies besetting your face, mosquitoes biting your ankles.  Instead more colorful, less hyperactive nocturnal insects creep out of the shadows.   When the porch lights switch on after twilight, it only takes an hour or so before moths appear on the scene.  These lepidopterans share a large family with skippers and butterflies, varieties that I mostly see during the daylight hours.  The nocturnal moths are just as attracted to my home's lights during colder temperatures in the fall and spring.  While many are colorful, it's their wide variation in size that's most notable, ranging from a tiny couple millimeters to almost the width of a hand when the polyphemus moth pays an infrequent visit. If monsoon rains have drenched the landscape, June bugs - despite the name, it's usually July when they start sh...

As a child in suburban New Jersey in the early seventies, summer fears were numerous: shark attacks down the shore, thunderstorms that kept you housebound for longer than an hour, and going to federal prison for killing a praying mantis.   In reality, shark attacks were almost unheard of until the blockbuster "Jaws" fed the rumor they were a regular occurrence, while our neighbor's wrap-around porch provided a safe and dry playground in inclement weather.   And the idea that the praying mantis was so endangered or such a valuable tool in the fight against agricultural pests was just an urban myth.  It seems that fact wasn't disproved the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, as I just discovered the information on Snopes.com, the well-regarded fact-checking website.  Praying mantises or mantids  show up at my Prescott home late every summer.  In fact. this past week exactly three individuals appear...