A RARE AND DIFFERENT TUNE.(katydid sounds)

Some people go through life never knowing what a katydid is, or what kind of bug makes which sound, when, and for what reason. These people would probably think it frivolous to identify the species of tree that they might be sitting under as they decline to wonder about the origins of the bug sounds coming out of it. But the particular bug sounds chronicled below took place under a big linden, just outside the city. This was during the blackout, a few weeks ago, when anyone who was near trees might suddenly have noticed, in the absence of some of the other usual night noises--air-conditioners, floor waxers, Ernie Anastos--that the bugs, whatever they were, were making a hell of a racket.

A discussion, not quite an argument, arose over what was making which sounds. Out of the symphony, you could isolate certain strains: a wee-wee-wee and a weeeeee and a click-click-click, and a number of other drones and trills and, above it all, an intermittent staccato call that sounded a little like Beavis laughing--ih-ih-ih, ih-ih-ih. It was clear right away that the people under the linden had been making unexamined assumptions all their lives, at least when it came to late-summer nighttime bug sounds. Crickets rubbing their legs together, one person said. Cicadas, said another. Isn't it pronounced cicaaahdas? asked a third. No, cicaaaydas. Cicaaahdas. Cicaaaydas.What about tree frogs? Are there tree frogs here? Frogs? In trees? Crickets. The more you listened to the trees, the stupider you felt, like someone who'd been playing "Rubber Soul" every night for thirty years without knowing who'd made it.

Thank God the electricity came back on, because it gave everyone a chance to log on to the Internet for some insta-entomology. Some Googling turned up an array of wonderful things, chief among them FindSounds.com, which does what it sounds like it should. Type in "cricket" and you get a hundred and sixty-five brief samples of different cricket songs, some of which last less than a second--blee, blee. You can get your computer to play little swatches of late-summer night. After a few hours of this--with detours into other summery sounds (golf shots, home runs, ocean waves, gulls), plus drumrolls, shotgun blasts, and a wide variety of burps and moans--it was a bit clearer what was going on in the trees on these late-summer nights. Many different species of cricket were responsible for the melodious blee, blee. The buzzier drones were apparently cicadas. The ih-ih-ihs, or, if you ...