Bug Catching

I'm going to start this post with a gorgeous picture of Kennedy and myself. 

I look drunk (or sleep deprived), and she looks like a neglected 4th child. 

Trust me, we are neither one of those things. Except for the sleep deprived part.

But we are cute!

This summer Grant has become obsessed with bug collecting. If it's a living creature, he will catch it. And he will force you to look at it, then look it up in your bug field guide to identify it, then display it in a tupperware on your counter for weeks.

You know how one measly day, or experience, can change the course of your entire life? This was the day, this was the experience… that turned Grant from a normal 8 year old into a fixated bug enthusiast.

We had just gotten home from church (notice the mismatch of church/sleep attire below), when the boys spotted something red moving through the grass. It was bright red, and it wasn't just moving… it was BOLTING through the blades of grass. They were trying to blockade it, but it outsmarted them each time and found a way around. 

It was a raving-mad bug!

The good news is, they finally caught it in a jar. The bad news was that after some research, we discovered that it was a "Cow-Killer" dun-dun-dun! Thank goodness my boys didn't try to pick it up with their hands. 

A quote from the field guide, "Adult Cow Killers can run quickly and fight ferociously. They get their name from their painful sting - so severe that many people claim it could kill a cow."

This bug and I are not friends.

Here are the boys, proud owners of a ferocious cow-killing ant.

You can see the ant in the jar, trying with all it's might to get the lid off the glass jar.

See the look in Grant's eyes? He's addicted now.

 

From this day on I have had small tupperware containers cluttering my countertops. I moved them above the refrigerator, but there were so many they were falling off when I opened the fridge. 

Grant has caught numerous butterflies and moths, cicadas, a black horse fly, and 3 more cow killers!

They say it's normal to find 1 cow killer, but even that is rare. Several people who grew up in the south have never seen one. We have found 4! I'm literally scared to walk outside my house.

This first one was kept in the glass jar for 3 weeks before it died. It just felt inhumane to let him suffer that long. So, Grant discovered a quicker way to kill them... put a cotton ball of nail polish remover into the container with them... they die within minutes. I thought the first method of death was inhumane, this was actually torture.