Those songs, while pleasant to our ear, and psyche, were not created for our edification. My search for night-singing insects (crickets and katydids) has brought me on weeks-long journeys from Florida to Maine during the seasons when insect song is at its crescendo. It is often the case that the “hunt is the thing”.

They sang in my studio for the rest of the summer and into the early autumn, bringing me back to that verdant wetland. I went home with a jar of 7 Sphagnum Ground Crickets four males and three females. It is amazing the volume of sound that can be produced by those diminutive wings. And tiny they were! Their little reddish-black bodies were no more than three-eights of an inch from head to tail. It worked beautifully! In short time we had forced over a dozen of these tiny singers to the surface.

Any little critters living amongst it would be forced to climb to the surface to avoid becoming submerged. If you push down on the moss, it creates a puddle. In 1904, Canadian entomologist Edmund Murton Walker wrote of a technique one could apply in this instance. While the sound of the sphagnum ground crickets was everywhere, we could not see any. Perhaps I’d be viewed as some hapless shaman, or just another unfortunate bug collector. I wondered aloud what future excavators would make of me with my bag of empty jars, butterfly net, digital recorder and camera. Visions of those ancient “peat men” dug up in old European bogs kept a constant tendril of caution in my movements. At no time was the possibility of falling through and sinking beneath the moss far from my thoughts. Walking on a quaking bog is an experience in itself, much like walking on a large, soggy trampoline, or waterbed. The sound hovered over the bog, and when mixed with the croaking of ravens in the background, this rare and ancient habitat in which they resided became all the more magical. Process of elimination, and the habitat from which they sang, strongly suggested this was our quarry! There was an ethereal quality to the song – it came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It was a soft, high-pitched sound, produced by the blending of many chorusing males. Upon reaching the edge of the bog, we began to pick up the faint trill of crickets. Getting to the bog involved a hike through a sloping woodland and then a balancing act atop a sixty-foot long beaver dam. Whether or not it was inhabited by these crickets, I did not know. I knew of such a bog in the northwest corner of the state of Connecticut. Sphagnum Ground Crickets live solely in open sphagnum moss bogs. Because of this, our forays often cover little more than a few yards per hour. We are all naturalists, each with a focus unique to the group. The friends are part of a group we call “Corps of Discovery”, after the band of explorers forming Lewis and Clark’s assemblage in the early nineteenth century. Corps of Discovery member Andy Brand pushing for crickets by John HimmelmanĪ few years ago I gathered some friends to hunt for the smallest cricket in North America, the Sphagnum Ground Cricket (Allonemobius palustris).

Ancient cricket sounds