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!