My main camera is several generations old and when it’s time to upgrade, one of the things I’m looking forward to is how much more fun macro photography will be with the live view mode of modern SLR’s. It will be nice to setup the tripod and watch the screen instead of hunching over and squinting into the viewfinder, especially when working near our many (and thorny) rose bushes. The roses have snared enough pounds of my flesh.

This picture of an adult katydid was taken handheld in 2006, it was eating the petals of a spent rose blossom from one of the old bushes beside the house. A little side benefit about having a dog is that we usually take Ellie out through the back and walk her past this side of the house, so now we get to see the rose bushes daily when before we wouldn’t see them at all.

I found my first katydid of the year, a young one, walking along the leaves of one of my coneflowers, my favorite flower in our wildflower gardens. This particular patch of coneflower grows like crazy, there are many flowers forming and it won’t be long before they’re blooming!

I forget how small these young katydids are until I see them in person, they look so much bigger in pictures.

We’ve had two adult katydids this year, both of which are hanging around the side of the house where there are a handful of rose bushes and a few stray gladiolus (at least I think that’s what they are). This one prefers the gladiolus and is usually close enough to photograph, while the other prefers a particular rose bush where it is often nearly out of sight and too far away for pictures.

Given this, I’ve named them Katydid and Katydidn’t.

Perhaps an even more worrisome sign than saving the lives of your garden pests is giving them nicknames.

I’ve adopted a live-and-let-live policy towards the katydids in our yard. Unlike the swarms of little aphids, there aren’t very many of them and they don’t do much damage, so I tolerate a few chewed up plants in exchange for a few pictures.

It’s actually more than a live-and-let-live policy, as when I trim the roses I try to make sure that any katydids on the cut stems make it safely back to the main plant before the stems go in the yard waste bin. The fact that I go to any effort to save the lives of some of my garden pests is probably a sign that I need to see a therapist.

This adult preferred the gladiolus over the roses, you can see a hole in the stem that it has gouged out. The flowers were already spent so it wasn’t really hurting anything.