Overlapping seasonal music

Male katydid.

Groundscraper thrush.

“One evening early this month of August, we were privileged to hear a joint presentation of the summer song of the thrush and the  fall fiddling of the katydid. We are told that it is not unusual for these two musical halves of the season to overlap; it often happens that a thrush will sing late or some katydid rehearse early.

“But this year there was that single evening on which we heard the very last of the song that denotes the fullness of summer and the very first stirrings of the insect that it is supposedly the prophet of the frost to come within six weeks. And this, according to friends of ours who make something of such notations and who also observed that the thrush remained silent on succeeding evenings, was an unusually precise timing for the changing of the musical guard.’’

-- From In Praise of Seasons, by the late Connecticut editor Alan H. Olmstead, who lived in a rural area east of Hartford.