“Crickets.” The term has come to mean no response to a question or action – as in the only sound you hear is insects in the background.
It’s typically meant humorously, but there is nothing funny about the decline of the cricket symphony in recent summers.
I don't want this to come off as a “back in the day” essay, but I’m certain our summer nights don’t have the volume of cricket noise they once did. The insects that do sing are still as loud, but there aren’t as many of them.
Crickets are my first choice for fishing bait, so when we purchase a few dozen for the pond, I can still hear the familiar refrains. The sound comes from male crickets rubbing their wings together to attract mates. They even carry the tune when they’re confined to a small cricket cage, where the attraction distance is just a few inches.
Among the numerous species in Missouri are field crickets, house crickets, cave crickets, tree crickets and the handsome trig also known as the red-headed bush cricket. Those sold for bait are raised for sale. The market for them is boosted by people who feed crickets to their exotic pets.
When I was growing up, it seemed like we could always find black field crickets under rocks or wood piles around the house, but as fish bait they never seemed as appealing as the farm-raised and store-bought house crickets.
Tree crickets look more like small katydids or skinny grasshoppers. They are more often heard than seen, and their thin bodies make them difficult to thread onto a fishing hook.
House crickets and brown field crickets can look very similar. The cave cricket, also known as the camel cricket, is usually the same light brown color as its cousins, but its hump-shaped back makes it easy to identify by its nickname.
Cave crickets are the ones you are most likely to find in the damp areas of a basement. Their other nickname is spider cricket, which is unfortunate for the fear it evokes. While they have long legs and may make startling jumps, they have no ability to bite or venom to inject.
Some of the reduction in crickets and grasshoppers has resulted from the elimination of habitat, but plant modification and liberal use of insecticides are to blame as well. A Google search for crickets results in a lot more websites offering to help you kill them, rather than information about their positive attributes.
One of my favorite bits of cricket trivia is the method for determining the outdoor air temperature by counting cricket chirps. The tempo of the common field cricket’s tunes consistently picks up as the heat rises. On hot days they can produce new notes more than three times per second.
The formula to convert cricket chirps to degrees Fahrenheit from the Old Farmer’s Almanac is to count the number of chirps for 14 seconds, then add 40. The sum matches the air temperature. For example, if the cricket chirps 30 times in 14 seconds, you would add 40 to get a temperature of 70 degrees.
It was not all that long ago that sleeping outdoors or with the windows open brought an overnight cacophony of cricket sounds. Hopefully their summer soundtrack won’t someday be known only in stories of the good old days.
John Winkelman is Marketing Director for Liguori Publications near Barnhart, Mo., and the Associate Editor for Outdoor Guide Magazine. If you have story ideas to share for the Leader outdoor news page, e-mail ogmjohnw@aol.com, and you can follow John on Twitter at @johnjwink99.