Dark bush Crickets

There was a stillness to the morning, a calm that had draped itself over the river, delivering an almost soporific quality to the air. The river flowed with a gentle ease, reflecting the lack of rain over recent days, as it murmured its way quietly downstream. Only the steady chirps of dark bush crickets broke the silence. These calls, with their resonant quality, had a tropical feel to them, something enhanced by the slightly humid air of this mild early morning. Every bush or piece of waterside vegetation seemed to host several crickets; each one was sat squarely like a little toad, squat in posture and dark brown in colouration. The short chirping call was an advertisement, directed at a potential mate.

I had come down through the meadows to collect two crayfish traps, set the previous evening. As I moved through the vegetation I could smell the umbellifers and that strange aroma that I have come to associate with wet meadows. It is an almost acrid scent, slightly unpleasant and vaguely reminiscent of a public lavatory, but with an underlying sweetness. I remember how the short-tailed voles, that I used to live-trap as part of a study into their ecology, also had this scent and how it clung to my clothes after early morning rounds of my traps. Did the voles acquire the scent through their diet or because they lived within the pungent vegetation? I am sure a botanist could tell me its source and the chemical nature behind it.

The two traps are packed with crayfish, despite being in the water for only a dozen hours, and it is clear that this section of the river still supports a very large population of signal crayfish. I have commented before upon the problems that this introduced species has caused, wrecking river banks, reducing fish populations and eliminating our own native species of crayfish. Although I am trapping these signal crayfish in order to monitor their numbers, and to test the effectiveness of different types of trap, I am not allowed to release them back into the river. Instead, they must be killed and so end up in a pot, cooked and then served with a garlic mayonnaise or forming the centrepiece of a pasta dish.

As I trudge back to the car with my bucket of crayfish, I become aware of another cricket calling. This is Roesel’s bush cricket, a large species with a distinctive high-pitched call. It sounds like a softly running fishing reel, of the old-fashioned style used for fly-fishing, and is one of the first sounds to disappear through the hearing loss than comes with age. I am glad that it is still part of my morning soundscape.