Grasshoppers And Crickets

If you have replaced your lawn with artificial turf or keep it close cut through the summer you will probably not see any grasshoppers. However, let the grass grow, even in just a patch or two and you are likely to be rewarded with some. In the first year that the School let the grass in the wildlife patch grow tall the children found (and heard on hot days) several of them. There are a number of species of both grasshopper and cricket that pop up in sympathetically-managed gardens in Wenvoe and we have recorded Field, Meadow and Common Green Grasshoppers along with Speckled Bush Crickets, Dark Bush Crickets (see photo) and Short-winged Coneheads. Bush Crickets are different from ‘true’ Crickets which we are unlikely to see locally. Bush Crickets have long antennae whereas grasshoppers have relatively short ones.

Grasshoppers often appear in literature. One of Aesop’s fables was the Ant and The Grasshopper and Keats wrote a poem entitled On the Grasshopper and Cricket. Charles Dickens wrote The Cricket on the Hearth. And who can forget the dapper Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio. Against a backdrop of a decline in our flying insects by 60% over the last 20 years we cannot afford to ignore the plight of many species. A Government report states – ‘Invertebrates are integral to our natural environment, fundamental to the food chain and excellent indicators of the health of our natural habitats’.

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