Field Notes—

 

What Katy Did

By Curtiss Clark

We sleep these August nights under thick layers of thrumming sound — the air conditioning compressors, the passing bumping woofers of pumped up teens wound tight after a big night, the chirp and buzz of vast seething choruses of crickets and cicadas. And above it all, from the haphazard grasses of the meadow to the highest leaves of ancient trees, the debate rages: Katy did. Katy didn’t.

What Katy did, or didn’t, do depends on the imagination of the person telling the story, but one common folktale contends that the heart of a young woman named Katy was broken one summer night by a suitor who chose to marry her more beautiful sister. The newlyweds were found dead in their wedding bed, setting off the still unresolved debate about their fate, even among the insects.

Connecticut is a state of endless summer — at least for katydids. Their lifespan, from egg to egg, runs from the hatching warmth of spring to the first frost of fall, when they tumble to the ground from their egg-laden perches and die. Their existence is one big summer romance, metamorphosing as fast as they can from nymph to sexually mature adult, finally breaking into their crushingly monotonous love song by the end of July or early August.

The endless stridulations of the males (the katy-did riff, which really sounds more lie zhuh-zhuh-zhuh, zhuh-zhuh-zhuh) that lull us to sleep on August nights have the opposite effect on sexually responsive females of the species. They listen intently with their hearing organs, called tympana, which they wear chastely below the knee of their front legs.

If they like what they hear, the females answer these exoskeletal Elvises with a far less audible click and rush the stage. Males can often be heard singing call-and-response duets about the great Katy issue. Researchers have noticed that some of the males of certain katydid species will lurk like roadies in the wings nearby a particularly popular heartthrob crooner hoping to pick up the groupies as they pass by.

The katydid creates its signature sound by rubbing its wings together. A protrusion on one wing is rubbed over a ridged scraper on the other. A resonating membrane behind the head and between the wings amplifies the resulting vibrations. The National steel guitars of the bottleneck slide blues players we hear (along with the katydids) in the background of virtually every movie set in the Mississippi Delta use the same resonating system of amplification. In both instances, the resulting sound reverberates with a palpable sense of the steamy heat of summer.

The song of the katydid has more than a sensual connection to heat. The rate of the rasping stridulations is regulated by temperature. Katydids fall silent at temperatures below 45 to 50 degrees. As the temperature rises, they increase the tempo of their song. In fact, they make pretty reliable thermometers. If you count the syllables of their song for 15 seconds and add 40, you’ve got the temperature to within a degree or two.

On these hot summer nights, as the temperature rises, the rhythms of the katydid are all about life, passion, and procreation. But if you listen, you can hear the grim reaper sharpening his scythe to the tune. He knows nothing is endless but eternity.

The katydid doesn’t know it, but Connecticut’s summers do end, and despite their best efforts, the debate over what Katy did or didn’t do will remain forever unresolved.