Do Praying Mantises Kill Hummingbirds?
Have you seen a praying mantis on your plants for feeders? Does it keep coming back?
A large mantis is fully capable of catching and eating hummingbirds, so this is a serious situation. Once an individual mantis develops a fixation on your feeder, it may come back repeatedly to try to nab a hummingbird. You could catch the mantis and take it away. You could drive to some natural habitat a few miles away and release it there. Or you can simply remove the feeder for a few days and let the mantis find a different hunting spot.
Praying mantises do a lot of exploring, and they sometimes wind up perched on hummingbird feeders. Mantises are predatory mostly feeding on smaller insects, and they may catch bees or other bugs attached to feeders. However, large mantises have been known to catch and even kill hummingbirds
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