On a naked tree, I saw something.
It was a beautiful leaf-winged katydid, with yellow eyes and red knees.
Katydid’s red knee.
They're not great flyers. When pushed, they might glide or flutter mostly towards the ground, and then start walking. Nice wings, though!
Above: that’s some ovipositor!
Red-green-yellow.
These are related to crickets, not grasshoppers. That was a surprise to me because I thought crickets and grasshoppers were pretty closely related anyway, but they're not even in the same family. They’re in the same order, but different suborders.
Grasshoppers have short antennae and katydids tend to have very long ones. Grasshoppers do stuff during the day, and katydids do things at night.
Here you can just make out that the antennae extend past my fingertip! Longer than its body. As a kid I discovered that if you get a katydid’s attention with a wiggling finger, the antennae will follow your finger around.
That day I also found this, a common split gill. These are very common but sometimes you can catch really beautiful patterns on the underside, like these.
Whoop! Whoop! This is my hundredth post!!!
