Grasshoppers, from Kengi. I have a fondness for hoppers. Click for full size.
© Kengi. All rights reserved.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Grasshoppers, from Kengi. I have a fondness for hoppers. Click for full size.
© Kengi. All rights reserved.
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They’re really holding onto the leaves and the middle ones look like they’re pretending not to see each other. Warm pictures.
Grasshopper is heinäsirkka in Finnish. Heinä means hay or tall grass and sirkka has multiple meanings, in this case I think it come from sirittää, which is what their noisemaking is called (onomatopoetically). Sirkka is also a woman’s name, a surname and a village in Kittilä in Lapland. The Disney character Jiminy Cricket is Samu Sirkka.
In two available colours: fluorescent orange, and day-glo green!
I find it difficult to approach grasshoppers due to their propensity to take off while I’m still trying to focus. :P A bit jumpy, they are. Haha. :)
I love their eyes.
Also, they’re known as sisenis here, which is an onomatopeic rendering of their singing (and illustrated in children’s stories as violin-playing). Kaydids, closely related, are known as ‘hay ram’ here -- sienāzis, where siens is hay and āzis is a ram. Because of the long curvy antennae, like a ram’s horns. The two terms are generally used interchangeably, though, mostly due to public ignorance of the difference.
(A cricket (same family) is circenis, again onomatopeic, because the sound is more chirpy than the grasshopper’s buzz.)
AFAIK, heinä is an old Baltic loanword.
A katydid would be a hepokatti here. A direct (but probably ethymologically wrong) translation would be horsecat. A cricket would be sirkka (there’s just one species here, Acheta domesticus, so I was ignorant about the difference between crickets and grasshoppers until today).
Ice Swimmer
I’m worse at separating grasshoppers and katydids -- I’m good with crickets, they’re the only black orthoptera around (and technically we have two species, we have mole crickets, too, which are pretty neat to see live…).
Interesting with the heinä.
Heinä was šajna in Proto-Finnic. It’s possible that Baltic-speakers introduced cattle-raising (and thus hay) to Finns while becoming an early elite with their battle-axes.