Xavier Meets a Katydid
Greetings to all.
Last night, in the cold drizzle and wet grass, Xavier and I played hide and seek, a game he has come to like quite a lot.
As he hid in the hedge along the newly raised fence and I pretended not to see him, something dropped out of the tree near where I stood.
After seeing what fell, I called Xavier over, asking him if he wanted to see a katydid. Of course, he did. Some weeks ago, he and I spent quite some time outside with flashlights looking for chirping crickets and clicking katydids. Now, we had one!
We examined it for a while, but it was too cold for it to move around much. When it warmed up sitting on our hands, it moved and sometimes flew off, but always succumbed to cold air again. We decided to give it a home in a little sand bucket with some leaves from a cottonwood. Xavier made a little house out of Tinker Toys and set it over the bucket, then we went in for the night.
Today was a much nicer—and warmer—day. Xavier and I fixed a problem with the newly hung gate, then checked out the katydid.
I was gone!
We did find it soon enough, however, as it tried to find its way closer to the warmth of the house walls. More active today, the insect gave Xavier more than an hour of amusement.
He moved the katydid all over the yard, watched it climb over grass and up tree trunks. At first he did not like it climbing on his arm, but soon got used to it—so long as it stayed in sight and never went above his elbow. If it did, he got more than a little nervous.
We ended up putting the katydid back in its house, where it remained the rest of the day. Sometime in the night, it left, probably to find greener pastures and higher trees.