Bush Crickets 4

Sue Morton writes:

This will be my last blog about bush crickets for this year, as sadly they don’t survive the winter. 

I last heard Speckled bush crickets in my garden with the aid of a bat detector on 26 October, a couple of optimists still clicking away in the forsythia.  A couple of weeks earlier, when petrol was hard to come by but the weather was warm and sunny, but breezy, we walked from my house in Witney in a loop via Poffley End, New Yatt and Ramsden, and heard (through the bat detector) four species of bush crickets (Speckled, Roesel’s, Dark, and Long-winged conehead), and also saw the Roesel’s and Long-winged conehead. We also found some Long-winged Coneheads at Parsonage Moor after the geology visit to Dry Sandford Pit on 3 October.

Here’s a short (and rather fuzzy)  video clip of a Long-winged Conehead “singing” by rubbing its wings together on that windy day.  Warning: might make you feel seasick! The sound was recorded from my bat detector set at about 30kHz at the same time.

This second video clearly shows a male long-winged conehead (on a different, less windy day) vibrating its wings but there’s no sound on that recording because I didn’t have my bat detector handy.

My project for next year will be to get some better videos!