The other day my oldest daughter ran inside with a wild look in her eyes.

"Daddy!" she said. "There’s something….there’s something…"

"There’s what?" I asked her.

"There’s something on the window screen," she said. "You have to come look!"

I have a soft spot for four-year-old daughters, especially this one, so I agreed to go with her.

She escorted me to the window screen and pointed up at this… this…

Well, my first thought was, "Whoa. That’s gotta be the biggest grasshopper I’ve ever seen."

My daughter is at that age where she likes to keep all forms of insects as pets, and so since the brilliant escape of her last pet, a spotted jumping spider, we happen to have a vacant plastic insect cage for just such occasions.

She kept a watchful eye on….it…...while I went inside to get the "it" container.

Being too big of a baby to grab it with my bare hands, I scooped it inside the container and closed the lid.

As it turned out, "scooping" instead of using my bare hands was a wise choice.

After some research, we found out that this bug is no grasshopper.

In fact it is a female Greater arid-land predaceous Katydid.

A rather mean bug, this five-inch-long insect is a cannibal, of sorts. She eats other types of Katydids as well as other bugs.

One online account said that if you prod this bug, it will not hop away like you would expect. No, it will charge you and take a bite out of your finger, drawing real red blood!

One of the great things about living out in the country is the never-ending variety of animal and insect life that surrounds us.

Heaven knows, there are lots of freaky lookin’ bugs in the Lone Star State.

It’s all part of what makes living here so much fun.