Ed. Note: Any assistance that you are able to provide to the Friends of Kardon Park will help a worthy cause.
Subject: insect
Location: Chester County, PA
August 8, 2012 7:05 am
it looks like a bug with grasshopper hind legs but the body doesn’t look like a grasshopper. Body is bright green with a dark design down its back. Antennae longer than the body – black with white ’dashes’ that get longer toward the end of each.
And it’s sitting on very colorful dock (plant)
I think it’s a fascinating and quite pretty insect, but what is it???
Signature: cheers
immature katydid
Hi, Daniel
Thank you so much for the immediate response! I had taken a picture of the most colorful Dock in the meadow next to a pond in Kardon Park, Downingtown, Chester County, PA in 2010. Seeing it on the computer, I saw and then enlarged the beautiful bug. Back then, I’d emailed a photo of it to an entomologist who responded with, “I’m not sure”
I am a member of Friends of Kardon Park a non-profit group trying to protect the 50-acre park from development. We’re now in the first round of appeals.
The Immature Catydid photo is # 22 of 25 in this series below (on our facebook page).
http://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?fbid=421540607887233&set=a.421539367887357.90670.305910192783609&type=1&theater
When I am able to add the name to the picture, I will also include your name and website as being responsible for letting me know what it was!
Many thanks again and thank you for keeping up such a wonderful website
Sarah Brown
http://www.savekardonpark.com/
Help Save Kardon Park!!!
Hi again Sarah,
Now we are feeling guilty that we provided you with such a short response, but in the interest of responding to as many identification requests as possible, emails that we do not intend to post to our website just get brief answers. A more thorough response is that this is an immature Scudder’s Bush Katydid. Your follow-up correspondence struck a chord with us. We find it so admirable that you and your group are taking the time and making the effort to preserve this habitat. We are retroactively posting your letter and photo. There is such a wealth of wildlife in Kardon Park, as evidenced by the slide show, that we are horrified to think that this valuable resource may be lost to future generations. There are so many insects represented on your facebook page, including numerous species of Dragonflies, so preserving this habitat is a very worthy endeavor and it has resulted in our tagging your posting with the Bug Humanitarian Award. We will also be featuring your posting at the top of our website in the hopes that it will generate more publicity for the Save Kardon Park website and we also are also encouraging our readership to send supporting emails for your cause.
Hi, Daniel,
I am still at work and, thankfully, I have my own little office.
I received a call from the president of Friends of Kardon Park (FoKP) while I was reading your last note.
I started reading the letter again from the top and when I got to the statement where I had originally stopped,
well…I started to cry. Of course, they were very happy tears. While I was not expecting a letter back, I was
overwhelmed by your kind words of encouragement and especially by the exposure you propose for Friends
of Kardon Park.
The board members of FoKP ( I am VP) will be meeting tonight. I have printed out a couple copies
of our correspondence (no edits…my misspelled “catydid” will be there) so the others can read it.
Besides a donation (there will be) and the advertising on our facebook page, is there anything else we can do to help you?
Sarah Brown
Dear Sarah,
What’s That Bug? has a large and faithful readership that is interested in habitat preservation as well as the importance of the lower beasts in the intricate web of life on our fragile planet. It would be nice if you continued to send nice photographs of the “bugs” you encounter at Kardon Park to our site, bearing in mind that we are a small operation and we are not able to identify and post all the submissions we receive. Please put Kardon Park in the subject line of each submission you send and it will be sure to get our attention. Try to space out the submissions, bearing in mind that summer months we get the most identification requests. We will continue to do what we can on our end to help your cause to preserve Kardon Park.