Greetings, Earthlings!

"I Have Come To Eat Your Tomato Plants"

When we were eating lunch out on the patio the other day, we spotted this gigantic grasshopper clinging to the plexiglass of the varmint-repelling panels Cindy has constructed around the tomato plants.

At first we thought the grasshopper was caught in a spider's web inside the panel, but on closer inspection we realized the grasshopper was actually clinging to the plastic of the panel itself.  Seen through the panel, it looked like something from outer space.

I have no idea how it managed to cling like that--the plastic is so smooth you would think that there was no way to get a grip on it, but somehow this insect did it.  And, as if to show us that this was no fluke, it stepped very delicately along the face of the panel until it came to the wooden stake at the edge of the panel, where it stayed for quite a while before it flew off.

Cindy would be very happy to have one of the birds have this insect for lunch, but we're just not able to kill them ourselves.  In fact, a couple of years ago she had trapped another large grasshopper in the garden and put it in a jar  and then was faced with the dilemma of what to do with it.

Some gardeners just take their garden shears and cut the bugs in half, but we couldn't bring ourselves to kill it.  We didn't want to dump it in a neighbor's yard so it could eat their flowers.  If we threw it down into the canyon, it would just find its way back to our yard.

So we took it several blocks over and released it into the shrubbery around the police station.  They're not growing any flowers or tomatoes.

Another Grasshopper