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Updated: May 1, 2025
They are the call-notes of the males. In the common field-cricket of Europe the male has been observed to place itself, in the evening, at the entrance of its burrow, and stridulate until a female approaches, when the louder notes are succeeded by a more subdued tone, while the successful musician caresses with his antennae the mate he has won.
The Field-Cricket and its relatives also vary the volume of their song by raising or lowering the elytra so as to enclose the abdomen in a varying degree, but none of them can obtain by this method results so deceptive as those produced by the Italian Cricket.
The sunny hours of spring have their singer, the Field-Cricket of which I have written; while in the summer, during the stillness of the night, we hear the note of the Italian Cricket, the OEcanthus pellucens, Scop. One diurnal and one nocturnal, between them they share the kindly half of the year. When the Field-Cricket ceases to sing it is not long before the other begins its serenade.
The breath of evening is made sweeter by the odour wafted from some distant fresh-cut grass or broom that has been drying in the September sun. A field-cricket, waking up, breaks the silence with its shrill cry that is quickly taken up by others near at hand and far away in the dusk.
At the call of the field-cricket, the herald of the spring, the germs that slumber in nymph or chrysalis have broken through their spell. What haste and ingenuity are required to emerge from the natal darkness, to unwrap the swaddling-bands, to break the subterranean shells, to demolish the waxen bulkheads, to perforate the soil or to escape from prisons of silk!
What a slow and horrible agony for the paralysed victim, should some glimmer of consciousness still linger in its puny brain! What a terrible nightmare for the little field-cricket, suddenly plunged into the den of the Sphex, so far from the sunlit tuft of thyme which sheltered its retreat!
She selected a wide spot where the tunnel branched, each branch forming a cul-de-sac. Here she slew swiftly several suspicious-looking little tawny beetles and one field-cricket, who put up a rare good fight for it, found loafing about the place. It pleased the queen that here, in this spot, she would found her a city.
Bates, H.W., on variation in the form of the head of Amazonian Indians; on the proportion of the sexes among Amazonian butterflies; on sexual differences in the wings of butterflies; on the field-cricket; on Pyrodes pulcherrimus; on the horns of Lamellicorn beetles; on the colours of Epicaliae, etc.; on the coloration of tropical butterflies; on the variability of Papilio Sesostris and Childrenae; on male and female butterflies inhabiting different stations; on mimicry; on the caterpillar of a Sphinx; on the vocal organs of the umbrella-bird; on the toucans; on Brackyurus calvus.
It resounds even in the granaries, into which the insect strays, attracted thither by the fodder. But no one, so mysterious are the manners of the pallid Cricket, knows exactly what is the source of the serenade, which is often, though quite erroneously, attributed to the common field-cricket, which at this period is silent and as yet quite young.
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