WHISPERING HILLS: `EGYPTIAN ART' RESIDES IN INSECT ZOO

I pay an afternoon visit to my insect zoo. In the fall I call my summer wildflower garden and insect zoo. My husband calls it a weed patch.

The wildflower garden grows in the center of our backyard. I have brought seeds home, but have mainly just let it grow unattended for years. The 45- by 60-foot plot turns yellow with goldenrods and tickseed sunflowers in the fall. TAll boneset adds white and smartweed adds pink. Asters form a white border, and grasses fill any remaining spaces.

Dragonflies and damselflies feed on insects from the garden. Spiders spin their webs, and caterpillars defoliate what they need to grow. There are bees and flies, wasps and beetles, tiny moths, ants and crickets, and plenty of leaf hoppers.

The dense plants offer birds a banquet of seeds and provide protection from the harsh winter weather. Birds use a dead tree trunk my oldest son "planted" as a perch.

I go to sleep every night wondering which insects make the clicks, trills, buzzes, chirps and hums outside my window. I wonder the same as every day warms and the instrumentalists begin again. No one has made an identification tape of insect songs, and I've had no luck with nighttime flashlight searches.

I walk the perimeter of my insect zoo, hoping to learn a new song. A monarch, an American painted lady and several buckeye butterflies feed on the asters and goldenrods. Crickets take turns chirping; the meadow grasshoppers accelerate their clicks to a hum, stop abruptly and start again with very little pause between. At least I'm familiar with their song.

A female meadow grasshopper rests on a plant stalk. She has a green body and a brown, swordlike ovipositor at the tip of her abdomen. She uses it to insert her eggs into plant stems.

It takes a few minutes to locate a male. He rubs ridges on one wing against a scraper on the other to produce his song. Young grasshoppers either jump or walk away from me, managing to stay just out of sight in the green jungle. They resemble adults, only they don't have wings.

A bug on the barnyard grass looks like a piece of Egyptian art (see illustration). The half-inch bug has a matte gold body and pale blue wings.

I use the term "bug" literally when I talk about insects: Not all bugs are true bugs. True bugs belong to the Order Hemiptera which means "half wing," and refers to the forewings which are thick and leathery near the base and membranous near the tip. The forewings overlap when folded flat over the bug's back and cover the shorter hindwings. The prominent triangle between the folded wings is the scutellum, the modified third portion of the thorax.

True bugs have piercing-sucking mouthparts in the form of a beak. Most feed on plant juices like this one; others feed on insects and small vertebrates.

I haven't attempted to inventory the insects in my zoo, because the insect species are too numerous and my reference books too general. None of them identify this "Egyptian art" so I now name it the "Pharaoh Bug" for my own reference.

Kathy Phelps is a freelance nature writer and illustrator who resides in Harrisburg, Ill.