A Sticky Situation

Ten guesses what this animal is called?

I know once I saw the little critter on our front door I had to go online to find out its real name. And the winner is…(drum roll please) a Phasmatodea. An insect that looks like a twig on a branch.

According to a simple Google search:

“The stick insect is a herbivorous animal meaning that the diet of the stick insect is purely a vegetarian one. Stick insects mainly feed on leaves and other green plants, along with the odd berries or fruit.”

When I was a kid this was the perfect season to get an assignment from the teacher for arranging an autumn display in a shoebox.

It was my most favourite time of the whole school year.

First we would duck over to the shoe store to ask if they had any leftover shoeboxes. At home we would create a big square hole where the lid was and glue some green foil over it. Then on the side of the box we made a small hole big enough to peek through.

In the weekend we would head into the forest (which was within walking distance from our home) and collected coloured leaves, mushrooms and twigs to make a beautiful arrangement inside the shoebox.

Once the lid was placed on top, we had created a beautiful autumn scene to be viewed through the little peep hole on the side of the box.

In the forest, while we were keeping our noses to the ground, we would encounter these “stick-animals” crawling about. Many times they just looked like little sticks and blended in perfectly with their environment.

Magic times! Needless to say, the autumn displays lasted several weeks and served as a great source of entertainment for us as kids.