I spent yesterday in Toronto and nipped across to the Islands - a small group of now-stabilised sandbars a short ferry ride from downtown - looking for migrants. A combination of my jet-lag and the Islands’ slowly turning into a loud and brash amusement park contributed to the feeling that either most of North America’s migrants are no longer migrating (”This warbler is deceased, it is a having-been warbler, it is in other words no more…”) or had been put off by the thumping sound-systems and gone somewhere else.

If it was the latter they have my sympathies. Actually, if it’s the former and deforestation and massive urbanisation has wiped them off the planet then they have my sympathies too. It must be tough being a migrant when you think about it. And what do you get if you survive and make it in one piece to the Toronto Islands? You get met by the most blood-thirsty (literally), ferocious, and downright unpleasant mosquitoes this side of Florida. I’m still itching 24 hours later…

Enough of that, because the Islands are actually quite a pleasant spot, and I’m sure if you’re there birding when it’s not a weekend in the late summer things would seem much more right with the world than those opening paragraphs might suggest. Besides, there are always migrating Monarch Butterflies to keep things ticking along…

Sharp observers may well remember that Corey only fairly recently posted some great photos of Monarchs (they’re right here in fact), but this time of year every other North American blogger will be posting photos of Monarchs too and we’d hate to be left out, and besides can you really have too many Monarch photos? Speaking as a Brit who would otherwise only very rarely get to see a Monarch I think not.

As the photos show the butterfly was feeding on the nectar of the Purple Coneflower Echinacea purpurea, a rather attractive daisy native to the southern/central US [thanks to noflickster of The Feather and the Flower for the ID], and while wandering around this particular flowerbed I noticed that one plant in particular, seemed to be holding something of a menagerie of insects. There was one spiny-looking caterpillar (a moth of some sort I would think), a fly, a yellow bug of some sort, and what I took to be a crab spider half-hidden in the ‘cone’ of composite flowers…

All is not what it seems though.

I realised after getting quite close to said menagerie that the fly wasn’t moving, that the ‘crab-spider’ was another yellow bug, and that the first yellow bug (the one next to the fly) wasn’t just sharing space, it was sharing (actually, more like stealing) bodily-fluids and was holding the fly tight in rather strong and well-developed forelegs…

It tuns out that the yellow bug is actually a hymenopteran known as an Ambush Bug Phymata sp (this one is perhaps Phymata fasciata). Given this peculiarly-shaped bug’s colloquial name it doesn’t require much of a leap of imagination to figure out that it and its kind secrete themselves amongst flower heads and quietly wait for an unsuspecting fly, butterfly, bee etc to come along which they then jump on and kill. And how do they kill? In a method of feeding that must (surely?) get even Creationists wondering what the Big Guy was thinking that day, Ambush Bugs stick their mouthparts into their prey, inject it with toxins, and sit and wait patiently while the internal organs are dissolved into soup. They then slurp away until there is nothing left but a chitin sheath which is then discarded (one way to look for ambush bugs, apparently, is to look for the remains of sucked-dry insects beneath a flower and follow the stem up…). Isn’t Nature wonderful?

Well, of course it is…

Incidentally, we’ve featured a hymenopteran before on 10,000 Birds - the equally strange Lantern Bug.