This fellow is one of the actors of the insect world. His stage is a leafy branch and his role is an imitation of one of its twigs. He is so successful as an actor that we mistake him for a twig and he becomes invisible, Rarely does he go for a walk and never do we find him on the devil’s walkingstick, the thorny shrub which grows in the sunny south,

We can look for the walkingstick among the leafy branches of the walnut and cherry, the oak and the desert locust trees. We can look, but we are not likely to see this long, spindly insect, even when our eyes fasten right on him. For he looks just like the twit on which he sits.

He may be three to six inches long and some of the walkingsticks of warmer countries are a foot long. His six long thin legs are all the same length and he sometimes carries the front pair over his head like a pair of antennae.

You are not likely to catch him walking, for he s: )ends most his time chewing on the nearby leaves while he plays the role of a stodgy twig. But if you find a branch stripped bare of its leaves, you might just be lucky. Mr. Walkingstick, who did the damage, might be ready to find a new grocery store. He moves with a comical, sedate walk, much as you would expect a wooden twig to walk if it could move..

Mrs. Walkingstick lays her eggs in the fall and she rates as a very careless mother, even in the insect world where parents as a rule do not give a whoop for their offspring. She drops hex eggs, one here and one there, onto the fallen leaves which cover the ground. The eggs, falling

The eggs, falling like pattering raindrops, rest on the ground until spring.

Then they hatch into miniature copies of the parents they never know. The infants are green and they soon eat until they are so big that they have to shed their skins for larger ones, In a few weeks, the youngsters go through five or six of these molts. Then they are adults and they take upon themselves the color of the twigs they will imitate for the rest of their lives. The adults, like the youngsters the are wingless, though some of/ walkingsticks of the tropic do have wings.

 The walkingstick is a cousin of the cricket and the cockroach, the grasshopper and the katydid, the locust and, the preying mantie.

All these animals belong in the insect order Orthoptera, a word which means straight wings, though our walkingsticks have no wings at all.