Hello, fellow lover of all things green. While we don’t often see the nighttime chorus of insects from mid-to-late summer into fall, we indeed hear them, and some continue to sing by day, joining the daytime ruckus of the cicadas we spoke about last week. What a choir! They don’t cause significant damage, supply food for wildlife, and help keep garden pests in check. To follow are a few of our well-known nighttime singers.
The Agile Meadow Katydid Song is Unique
The Agile Meadow Katydid has a muted green body, cream-colored wings, and head. They adore weedy and grassy areas with lots of sun, live from New Jersey to East Texas, and are fast, hence the common name and scientific name, Orchelimum agile.
Short-winged Meadow Katydid (Conocephalus Brevipennis). Photo by Nancy Hughes on Unsplash
I disturbed this cute Katydid while weeding around pots in my nursery garden.
When threatened, they are savvy at hiding. Their camouflage colors blend with the leaves, and if further pursued, they rapidly hop repeatedly before resting. They can’t fly but use their wings to sing both day and night, although their songs differ a bit. While they don’t move much by day, they sing most loudly for a mate. Then, they are on the move at night when predators are less likely to find them while seeking food, primarily leaves, sometimes fruit, dead insects, and aphids if they are slow-moving.
I adore Biokids’ website’s description of their song: “The sound they make is distinct from that of all of the other types of katydids and grasshoppers. The song begins with a Zeeee, lasting three seconds, a five-second pause, and a series of Zips.” And sing louder and faster as the temperatures rise. Male Katydids rub their wings together to call females; both males and females have ears on their legs. Katydids will eat garden plants or crops, but typically not enough to cause much damage. Plus, they are food for frogs, snakes, birds, small mammals, spiders, and insects.
Fall Field Cricket: Gryllus pennsylvanicus male- Photo by: Kevinjudge, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
Fall and Spring Field Crickets look and sound the same.
Next in our nighttime chorus is the Fall Field Cricket (Gryllus pennsylvanicus), which looks and sounds the same as Spring Field Crickets (Gryllus veletis.) Both are large, black, with round heads and sing the classic cricket chirp, writes Songs of Insects.com, which describes it as “a series of clear, loud chirps at the rate of about one per second or faster. Each chirp is a brief trill consisting of three to five pulses given too fast for the human ear to detect.”
Fall and Spring Field crickets chirp day and night, though they are usually quiet at dawn. Their difference is that Fall Field Crickets overwinter as eggs that hatch in the spring and begin to sing and mate in mid-to-late July until the frost kills them. While Spring Field Crickets overwinter as nymphs mature quickly, come spring, they start mating songs with sounds much like the Spring Peepers. They continue to sing until late June or early July, then finish laying their eggs before they, too, die off.
In mid-summer, both Spring and Fall Field Crickets are often silent— a welcome intermission. Like the Agile Meadow Katydid, they feed on leaves, fruits, and dead insects, but they also feed on roots, flowers, and seeds, and they are sometimes cannibalistic, leaving me queasy. They’ll eat flea beetles and insects from spider webs, grasshopper eggs, and the pupa of flies and caterpillars. Pupa is the transformation between immature and mature stages. Fall Field Crickets may find their way inside, searching for warmth as winter approaches, feeding on paper, cotton, linen, wool, and fur. So don’t blame your holy dilemmas on moths only.
The Nighttime Singers only cause minor damage to gardens and crops.
Snowy Tree Cricket – Photo Credit- Calibas at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Snowy Tree Crickets sing from understory plants in and around woodlands. Then, find warmer spots closer to the ground and tree trunks when temperatures are colder. Their name Snowy comes from being so pale they appear white; folks call them Thermometer Cricket. They say you can determine the temperature by the rate of their pleasant, evenly-spaced chirps. Count the number of chirps in 13 seconds and add 40 to find the temperature in Fahrenheit. The warmer it gets, the faster the chirp, beginning at dusk until morning and sometimes during cloudy days. They rub their wings together to make eight, sometimes five, pulsed chirps that sound like Spring Peepers as the Tree Cricket do; don’t we adore their chorus?
As with the previous nighttime singers, the Snowy Tree Crickets eat a variety of flowers, fungi, and leaves, but they only do minor damage. And they eat aphids and scale insects, helping us in the Garden of Life, and serve as a food source for other critters— a beautiful thing, a beautiful chorus.
Enjoy listening to the nighttime chorus in the Garden Dilemmas Podcast (@11 soothing minutes) :
A personal note about Katydid:
Katydid is a nickname I gave my niece as a young girl. You may recall a mention of my soulful twin brother Bill’s daughter in Episode 129, Saving Snapping Turtles Lifts Spirits. Soon after Bill passed away, almost 12 years ago, I struggled over worry for his daughter, a teen at the time, and I felt helpless to help her, wishing to step in where Bill left off. It was an all-consuming worry that I had for her. Then I came upon a parched baby snapping turtle crossing the road and saved him. A miracle in that story released my worry and taught me to love and let go like a leaf in the water. We have no control over the currents. Let go of your worry for my daughter and send healing, love, and light were the words I imagined Bill saying to me.
In recent months, we helped her get into a community home thanks to an angel agency representative who, on her day off, met our niece at a restaurant where she was hanging out. She stayed about two weeks and then hit the road again. We pray she finds her way, but I’ve let go of the worry consuming my mind. We all have our lives to live, and we make choices, and hopefully, the choices will lead her to safety, comfort, and healing, something I wish for all of us as we go through trying times.
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A funny side note: This Carolina Grasshopper was sunbathing on a massive rock at Hemlock Pond in the Blue Mountain Lake section of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area yesterday. Jolee stalked it, got close, then hesitated before carefully poking at it. It jumped, and the galavant repeated itself over and over again. Such fun! It was hilarious :^). Thank you for reading my story.
Mary Stone, owner of Stone Associates Landscape Design & Consulting.
As a Landscape Designer, I am grateful for the joy of helping others beautify their surroundings which often leads to sharing encouragement and life experiences. These relationships inspired my weekly column published in THE PRESS, 'Garden Dilemmas? Ask Mary', began in 2012.
I dream of growing the evolving community of readers into an interactive forum to share encouragement and support in Garden and Personal Recoveries -
seeking nature’s inspirations, stimulating growth, weeding undesirables, embracing the unexpected. Thank you for visiting! Mary
