Two weekends ago, I was out in the garden doing some late summer harvesting. Our grapes (muscadine / scuppernong) are starting to ripen. I've picked a few so far (perhaps a gallon of them) and there will be a lot more in a few weeks.

Anyway, our vines are thick this year -- not sure if we pruned them too closely to the main vine, but the grapes are tough to get to reach and pick -- and I was buried in the grapevines looking for the familiar deep purple of the ripened grapes.

I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye, and I saw this critter staring at me. It was a praying mantis!

I assured him that I would be kind to him. A praying mantis is a good guy to have around, eating bad bugs and their larvae.

I took many snaps of him, some in macro mode, some not, some with flash and some without flash.  I took some videos of him as well.  He and I had a nice conversation for probably fifteen minutes.  I went around to the other side to get another angle on him, but he disappeared.  He was probably tired of talking to me -- or maybe he went home to get his camera so that he could show his wife and kids some closeups of me.

These pics were taken with my Nikon coolpix, a 4 MP camera with 3X optical zoom. I bought the camera over three years ago. It's not fancy, but it's taken beautiful photos for me.

Praying Mantises get their name because they often appear to be in a prayer-like position.  Because they are predatory (preying on other creatures) they are sometimes misnamed "preying" mantises.

They disguise themselves by looking like vegetation; they will even sway back and forth, mimicking vegetation swaying in the wind.

Cannibalism has been observed (especially during mating, where the female may sometimes bite off the head of her male suitor while mating is occurring), though there's some debate as to whether this happens normally in nature or if it's more a phenomenon of laboratory observation. 

These are fascinating creatures!