Sue Morton writes: You know what it’s like packing to go away – you can’t take everything, and this time my bat/cricket detector didn’t make the cut. I regretted this almost immediately when we arrived in Germany last month to balmy evenings, just right for bats, and resigned myself to a cricket-free holiday, as most bush-crickets’ songs are too high pitched for us to hear except through a bat detector.
It’s mostly bush-crickets (family Tettigoniidae) that we get in the UK, and having a bat detector greatly increases your chance of finding them. There is another family of crickets, the true crickets (family Gryllinae), whose songs are audible to humans. While strolling along a cobbled street in the north of Bavaria one evening, we heard a loud double chirping noise seeming to come from some gaps in the stonework in the front wall of one of the houses. Intrigued, we spent some time with our torches trained on the wall trying to find out what was making it.
We never did see a singing specimen, despite going back several times1, but judging by the sound we think they were house crickets, Acheta domesticus. These are naturalised in Europe and the UK, but according to my book “with much more emphasis on hygiene and cleanliness they have now become scarce” in the UK. There’s a short recording of them here:
We spent our second week in Germany in the west of the country by the Rhine, and on one of our evening walks we heard the high-pitched trilling song of the Tree-cricket, Oecanthus pellucens, (another true cricket) in a car park right next to the river. By the light of his phone, John managed to find one lurking in a hedge; more were singing in bushes by the river. A day or two later we found one in daylight on a mullein by a track through some woods.
Tree crickets (main picture) are slender and quite delicate looking compared to other crickets, with large filmy wings. They have been seen in the UK, with a breeding colony discovered at Dungeness in 2015. Perhaps they will spread northwards, as some other species of bush crickets have done in recent years.
A related species of Orthoptera, although not crickets, that we saw many of were blue-winged grasshoppers, Oedipodia germanica. They are about half a size larger than the grasshoppers we get here and are superbly camouflaged when on the ground, only revealing themselves by the bright blue “flash colour” of their hind wings when they fly – a rather fine sight that we tried, but completely failed to video. They’re not present in the UK, but have been recorded in the Channel Islands.
Sue Morton 2 October 2023
- We walked down the same street in daylight and discovered that the building where we had been poking around and shining our torches was in fact home to the local police criminal investigation office as well as the house crickets. Luckily nobody seemed to be at work so late in the evening. I’m not sure that our rusty O-level German would have been up to explaining what we were doing! ↩︎
WEST OXFORDSHIRE FIELD CLUB 