While doing some serious gardening the other day with my wife, preparing to sew new seeds in the kitchen garden, we witnessed something amazing and yet disturbing.

I’m sure 78% of my readers will place to many sexual thoughts into the above paragraph, trying to link it to the corny header of this post.  This post has nothing to do with intimate moments we (my wife and I) have.  It’s a blog about 50 Shades of Nature.

As we were trimming the hedge and pulling out the weeds, I suddenly spotted a strange animal crawling slowly on the fence.  In fact, there were three of these strange alien like species, with elongated body, long skinny legs and even longer antennas.  It was a walking stick animal.

I had never seen one in the Wild, only in captivity at the local WOW place.  Always behind an inch of glass – never free.  It was a special moment, not only for me, but immensely important for the kids to witness this too.

Enough with Xbox and iPhone games.  This was nature at its best.

Listen, I’m no David Attenborough, but I still want to impress my kids with my outdoor knowledge, obtained when I was a boy-scout and lived off the lands.

Calmly I explained that what we had here was three Walking Stick animals (bugs), which is a rare sight.  I went on to proclaim that the bigger walking stick bug was carrying the baby, strongly followed by the husband … most likely.

Like some Japanese tourist (stereotype), my wife went paparazzi crazy on the poor things, and snapped 20-30 pictures, with the flash going.  In parallel, I quickly googled walking animals and suddenly discovered that it was in fact a mating scene we were witnessing and not a carrying mother lifting her baby on her back.

This was back garden porn!

The amazing part of this ritual is that it can last hours, days or even weeks.  Forget about Viagra!  This little dude was riding his woman for exceedingly long time.  No wonder the pair moved very slowly up the fence.  It was Natural Geographic or Animal Planet right there, and we were in the ‘pit’ with front-row seats.

I couldn’t explain the sexual act to my kids, so continue my little white lie about mother and child.  I had no choice.  Too many questions would come flying at me if I suddenly told them that the animals were having sex.