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Oooooh! I’ve got an Ootheca

Elizabeth Morgan

Not once, not twice, but three times I’d got up from my desk, slid back the French doors to the garden and picked up the LifeSaver twig from the window ledge. “You silly girl,” I admonished the praying mantis who was, yet again, wound up in a mass of cobwebs and partly wedged between the mudbrick wall and the window frame. I decided on rescue mission #1 that ‘it’ was a she. No particular reason. “This is your last chance,” I scolded, as I unwound her as best I could and placed her safely on a geranium. (Evidently my writing was not going well and I was very cranky.) Ten minutes later I saw her legs pedalling the air. “Not waving but drowning,” I callously thought. “Your number’s up!” Curiosity (or morbid fascination) got the better of me. “Holy cow! What’s she doing?” First, she was upside down. Second, what was that steely blue triangle near her rear end? Third, what was she doing with her abdomen? It was pulsing, pushing. “She’s filling her Thracian helmet with eggs. How stupid of me. She’s built an ootheca and I’ve thwarted her inner desire three times.” I never did see her hatchlings but I sometimes dream of them, dining high on aphids and mosquitos. “Help yourselves, little darlings,” I murmur. “I’m not of much help.”