A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
katydid
A katydid is a large green long-horned insect related to crickets, with antennae longer than its body and forewings shaped and veined so exactly like leaves that some species carry fake blemishes and chewed edges. It sings by rubbing a scraper on one wing across a file on the other, mostly at night, and it hears through ears located on its front legs, just below the knee.
Etymology
The name is American and it is the sound written down. The northern true katydid produces a harsh rasping call that early listeners heard as three or four syllables and rendered as the accusation Katy did, Katy didn’t, which people repeated back and forth about a Katy nobody has ever identified.
Notes
The songs are species-specific and are the standard way of identifying them, since the insects are hard to find and hard to tell apart by eye. Temperature changes the tempo reliably enough that the chirp rate of some species can be used as a rough thermometer. A few tropical katydids are predatory and eat other insects.