night to morning

At the fall of darkness on these early August days, the air is filled with a remarkable cacophony: the chorus of katydids forming an outlandish web of sound. I don't recall ever hearing so many katydids calling at once and because the weather has been so warm, they call at a rapid rate and in a complex counterpoint of rhythms that truly livens up the night. The individual insects may be restricted to rather regular beats, slightly different versions of "katy-katy" "katydid, katydidn't" or even "katydid, katydidnot". But when dozens of individual calls overlap in constantly changing cycles, the result is a kind of fractal audio pattern of intersecting, seemingly random rhythms. Insect rock'n'roll!

When Juliette's friend Anna was visiting a few days ago, she discovered an all-green 'praying mantis' on the wicker couch in the porch. Or did she say grasshopper? But it was not a mantis, nor exactly a grasshopper but one of our katydids. Katydids are close relatives of grasshoppers but they are in a separate family all their own and they are definitely green.

The katydid din is at its maximum at the beginning of the night and seems to fall away gradually as the night progresses. After a while, there are no more katydids to be heard, only some of the longer and higher pitched insects of the night. Just before dawn -- even as the first light begins to glow -- the Screech Owl chimes in with his shivery trills. At least there was one calling this morning less than an hour before sunrise.

An adult Yellow-crowned Night-Heron was back in the pond at low tide this morning accompanied by a young bird -- almost certainly a young of the year (and not the rather neater first-year immature). In the mammal department there was a Red Fox in the reeds at the edge of the marsh and it may have been a different animal than the one seen earlier on; it was also small and young-looking but in a much neater and well-groomed pelage. Rocky Raccoon (or perhaps Rocky Jr.) was back at his sleeping post in the crotch of the big old pitch pine on the old right-of-way; he has been there quite regularly this spring and summer, sometimes as often as three or four times a week. And the big male deer, the one with a huge rack of antlers, was back with his companion, a smaller animal with short horns that may or may not be a doe.

Eric Salzman