I’m indebted to R for enabling this post, by finding me an insect I’d never seen before, and then acting as my glamorous studio assistant while I photographed it.
It was after 5pm, and after spending most of the day sitting on the cold flags in the tower, I judged that it was now just about cool enough to tackle the possibly fraught business of searching the garden for a photographic subject. But not much had emerged from shelter at this stage, beyond a handful of bees and a hoverfly, so when R came up from the wild garden and said that he’d just seen a very odd but very well-camouflaged bug on foliage by the wildlife pond, I happily abandoned my pursuit of them and trotted after him to see what he’d discovered.
I immediately recognised it as a cricket, but I couldn’t see it very well because it was on the shaded underside of this iris leaf, and I guessed – wrongly – that it was a cone-head. By this stage it was cloudy, and the light was very poor in the wild garden (we’ve had a couple of sharp showers since then, though I don’t think they’ve done much to help the parched state of the ground), and to avoid the ISO going stratospheric (and catastrophic, in an image with as little natural contrast as this), I asked R to gently bend the leaf backwards until the cricket came uppermost. R expected him to jump at this stage, but I know that crickets prefer to run away if they can, so I thought it was worth the risk. Once I was sure I had him in focus, R gently bent the leaf back to its previous position, and we went gratefully back to the relative cool of the house, where I was able to use the app on my phone and identify my subject as an oak bush cricket.
The oak bush cricket is believed to be quite common, but under-recorded, because it’s an arboreal species and spends most of its life cycle up in the tree canopy. Unusually for crickets, these are carnivorous, feeding on smaller invertebrates. This one is a male, identifiable by his curved cerci; the female has a long, scimitar-shaped ovipositor, which takes her body length up to around 1.7cm. The females will lay their eggs in bark crevices during the late summer, and nymphs will appear next year in around June. The other unusual thing about oak bush crickets is that the males don’t ‘sing’, but instead drum their feet on leaves at night to attract passing females. Sadly, the sound is said to be inaudible to humans.
