... by our front door this afternoon: so very beautiful and intelligent-looking. Katydids are one of those mysterious - to me - creatures that exist in American fiction: I was googling "grasshoppers" to try and identify this particular 2 inches of emerald green loveliness, and found this instead. I'm not quite sure what kind of katydid it might be - a male treetop bush katydid, maybe? - there are (who knew) many similar varieties. They might, indeed, eat citrus fruit, but I don't think that one constitutes a plague. On the other hand, Alice is reading Caroline Fraser's Prairie Fires - her biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who experienced plagues of locusts on the American plains (and that caused me to remember not just the large ones that we had to dissect at school, well pickled in formaldehyde, but being on a train going through Rajasthan on one occasion, through a dark cloud of locusts, and - although the guards told us to shut all the windows - how some large and pale pink-green ones made their way into the corridor and the toilet ...). This katydid was small and delicate by comparison.
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