texasmonthly.com
Katydids prefer to be heard rather than seen. The insect’s name, an onomatopoeic transcription of the male mating call, first appeared in print in 1784, in Scottish American physician J.F.D. Smyth’s travelogue A Tour in the United States of America. “Their noise is loud and incessant,” Smyth wrote, “one perpetually and regularly answering the other in notes exactly similar to the words Katy did, or Katy Katy did, repeated by one, and another immediately bawls out Katy didn’t, or Katy Katy didn’t…
4 months ago