Audible Summer Stillness

     Twilight fades to darkness on a warm, still, muggy September night.  Stop what you’re doing.  Turn off the media and the lights.  Go outside to a quiet place.  And listen.  Just listen.  Nothing more.  Don’t have a conversation.  Focus your attention away from the world of everyday human concerns for just a little while.  Give your ears time to adjust to the quiet sounds of the late summer night and try to filter out the louder, human-made ones.  Listen some more.  You’ll hear them.  Maybe only one or two at first.  With practice and focus you’ll be able to identify a number of different songs … and learn the singers.

     Before the killing frosts come to the Valley, late summer nights are filled with the soothing and strangely beautiful calls of crickets, grasshoppers and katydids.  We have an amazing number of common insects calling in the woods, fields and gardens around our homes.  With practice you can learn to distinguish the different singers.

     The Fall Field Crickets are the big black ones that hide under stones and garbage can lids or crawl under your garage door and even into your kitchen or basement.  The males call by rubbing one wing against another, making the typical crick, crick, crick sound.  They can be wonderful pets.  Bring a male inside and enjoy his notes for weeks.  You can feed him on bread, water and a piece of apple.  When you catch one you can tell whether it is a male or a female by looking at the end of its abdomen.  Both sexes have two cerci, segmented, tail-like appendages attached dorsally.  Females have, in addition, an ovipositor used to lay eggs in the soil.

     Common True Katydids live in deciduous trees.  Their loud, raucous, guttural calls repeat their three-syllable name endlessly.  They can be very loud, but I love how they liven up the night.  You can often hear one or two brave males calling on into October as long as there are still some leaves on the trees.  They eat the leaves of the trees they sing from.  Each year their night calls remind me that summer is half over.

     Snowy Tree Crickets are a pale green color and live in shrubs.  They have a very regular call note, not intermittent like the field crickets.  You will usually hear their musical notes coming from a woods edge or shrub border.  The females cut into the bark of elderberry and other shrubs and lay their eggs inside the twigs.  Sometimes called the thermometer cricket, you can tell what the temperature is outside by doing some simple math.  Count the number of notes you hear from one male in 13 seconds, add 40 and that should be the approximate temperature in degrees Fahrenheit.  Nathaniel Hawthorne described the call of this cricket as "audible stillness" and declared, "If moonlight could be heard, it would sound just like that."

You can see photos of the insects and hear their virtual calls at http://www.musicofnature.com/songsofinsects/iframes/specieslist.html.   To learn more, look for a wonderful book, Crickets and Katydids, Concerts and Solos by Vincent Dethier, a Zoology professor at UMass Amherst from 1975-93.  His lyrical prose will waltz you through a summer concert season with each species tuning up in turn as the weeks slide by.

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