Jeannie Jones, age 14, of Waynesville, N.C.,, for her question:

How does a katydid sing?

Only the Papa Katydid sings and he makes his cheerful noise by rubbing his wings together. The music making area is rat the shoulders where the wings meet and overlap. The upper wing is edged with a row of saw teeth. The under wing has a flattened area on which is a raised vein.

Mr. Katydid rubs the sawtooth edge of his upper wings over the vein on the lower wing, much as a fiddler saws away at a violin. The crisp, green wings net as sounding boards and the woods and fields echo and re‑echo with the cheerful chorus. Mrs. Katydid is content to listen and her ears are, of all places, in her front legs.

The crickets and grasshoppers also use their wings to make music. These fellows, however, use their sturdy legs as violin bows and their ladies also sing. The thick thighs of the back legs are rubbed against the crisp edge of the wings and the wings, like those of the katydid, act as sounding boards. There are many kinds of katydid, cricket and grasshopper and right now these busy fellows are tuning up for their summer concerts over fields and meadows from coast to coast. Each has a slightly different song, though it takes a clever expert to‑tell one from another.