Our Environment: “Crickets & The Coming of Fall” by Scott Turner
Sunday, September 22, 2019
As birds quiet down over summer, crickets rev up their chirping, a sound that I associate with the coming of fall.
Last weekend, Karen and I walked on the Ten Mile River Greenway behind the Kimberly Ann Rock Memorial Athletic Complex in East Providence. Crickets chirped at the ground level, within eye-level vegetation and even in the trees. Some of the insects produced continuous humming or buzzing sounds, while others clicked.
Male crickets are the sound producers. They chirp for the same reasons as male birds—to attract a mate and defend a territory. Research suggests that female crickets find louder-and-more-strident-chirping males the most attractive.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTTeeth-like ridges cover the bottom of a cricket wing, while the top of a cricket wing is similar in structure to a scraper. Male crickets chirp by rubbing together the upper part of one wing and the lower part of another. The resulting sound is called “stridulating.”
Some crickets give a slow rub that produces a click. Other crickets, such as the clear, noisy chirps of a field cricket (the common, large, black-bodied creature that people most-commonly recognize) come at rate of about one-per-second. The human ear cannot detect that each of those chirps is actually a rapid three- to five-pulse trill. Indeed, other crickets, such as the tree cricket, click so fast that all we hear is a vibration or trill discernible from a significant distance.
Most often, crickets are nocturnal. Last week, when nighttime temperatures dipped into the 40’s, I noticed that the crickets outside our home quieted and their chirping slowed.
Given that crickets are cold-blooded creatures, they take on the temperature of their surroundings. In warm air, they chirp easiest, but as conditions chill, so do crickets. The insects slow down and their chirping weakens.
Indeed, crickets grow quiet, as fall sets in. First frosts will kill some of the insects. Hard frosts will kill the rest. And then, it will be about an eight-month wait for the crickets of Southeast New England to call again.
In the 19th century, a scientist named Amos Dolbear correlated air temperature and the chirp rate of crickets. A shortcut to what is called Dolbear's Law suggests that we isolate the sound of a cricket, and then for 15 seconds, count the chirps that come from the insect. Add 40 to that count and the resulting sum will provide a rough estimate of the Fahrenheit temperature.
One caveat: Dolbear studied the snowy tree cricket, which isn’t as common around these parts as the field cricket. Hampered by temperature, plus age and mating success, a field cricket’s chirping isn’t as accurate as that of a snowy tree cricket.
Cricket cacophony comes at the peak of the harvest season in forest and field. When we stopped to listen to the insects on the Greenway, we noticed how the weight of multiple honeybees pulled down flower plumes atop goldenrod plants growing along the edge of the forest.
That forest edge was also rich in the ripe grape-like clusters of fruit atop the purple-red stems of tall pokeweed plants. Several of those berry clusters were already half bare, as pokeweed fruits are a favorite or birds and other wildlife, which pick-over the berries as soon as they ripen.
Pokeweed fruit is a lovely dark purple color. But they are poisonous to people.
On our trip to the Greenway, we realized that recognizing the resonance of cricket chirps led us to admire the goldenrod and honeybees, which resulted in our appreciating the pokeweed.
When we head outdoors, we never know where the experience will lead us.
Scott Turner is a Providence-based writer and communications professional. For more than a decade he wrote for the Providence Journal and we welcome him to GoLocalProv.com.
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