While visiting a friend’s family in southern Lebanon, his son spotted a truly bizarre creature: an awkward toad grasshopper, likely from the genus Orchamus. We ended up watching it for about fifteen minutes as it slowly scrambled up a tree trunk. These rare, plant-eating insects are famous for their incredible camouflage and massive size differences between males and females. Unlike their airborne cousins, toad grasshoppers have tiny, non-functional wings, relying instead on crawling across rocky deserts and mountain terrains. To survive the harsh, arid environments of the Levant, Israel, and Egypt, they sport a thick, rough, shield-like exoskeleton. This rugged armor makes them look exactly like lichen-covered pebbles or dried earth—a defense so effective that even after it jumped onto the tree, I had a genuinely hard time spotting it until it made another move.