Natural Disasters

This spring we did a lot of first hand learning about nature. Unfortunately most of the learning didn't have a happy ending. 

1. Praying Mantises: we got to watch them hatch and crawl around. We released 50 or so and kept 4. RJ was super good at catching fruit flies from our compost bin. We watched our 4 remaining mantises eat the flies ... but they all ended up dying. 

2. Robins: in the tree directly outside our garage window, we had some robins build a nest. Each day the robin laid another egg until there were 4 in the nest. Unfortunately one day we noticed that there were only 2 eggs in the nest ... and the robins abandoned. We couldn't find any trace of the eggs. Bummer.

July 7 Update

Good news. We have been finding some semi-mature praying mantises in our yard ... and in our house. Here is one that was hanging out in the basement.