Mantis in action

On most of my walks, I'm the one doing the watching, but when I was trekking through a Bracken-Fern-overrun cemetery, I noticed that someone was watching me. In the horror movie inspired by my travels, this praying mantis would be about six feet tall and eyeing me with malicious intent. All the searchers would find was my camera, and when they downloaded that last fateful—and fatal—image, they'd know what had happened. But the real mantis is only several inches long, and though big for an insect, it poses no danger to the naturalist... and the photographer. To other insects, of course, this watcher is the ultimate horror show: a dispenser of inescapable and probably none-too-rapid death. How well she succeeds—the females are the larger of the sexes—in her mission will show up later in the fall, when the bare branches and stems display telltale clusters of mantis eggs.