Imagine stumbling across a nationally important colony of creatures – back after nearly 120 years and numbering more right here in this one field than in the country as a whole.
Pretty special, right?
It’s a pleasant afternoon. Blue sky. Fluffy white clouds. A gentle breeze that has the tall grass nodding in approval. You’d probably want to hang around. Sit and wait for a sighting of those rare creatures. Absorb the moment. Feel a deep connectedness to the natural world.
Or you could wander on, wondering: “What’s making that racket? I’ll look it up later.”
It sits in the middle of the deck in front of our house, long hind legs poised to spring and body padded up like a tailender going out to face Mark Wood1.
When animator Ward Kimball was tasked by Walt Disney with drawing Jiminy Cricket for Pinocchio, he took a look at a cricket under a microscope and was “horrified” by “all these spikes and hairy things sticking out”. Disney wasn’t impressed by early sketches that actually looked something like a cricket, which is how Pinocchio’s sidekick in the movie ended up as a broad bean on legs.
Kimball had a point though. You maybe have to be into crickets to see the beauty – bit like the sport, really.
The crickets in our garden – dark bush-crickets – make a kind of finger-dragged-along-a-comb sound2. Back on our walk, what’s ringing out from the field that climbs gently away from a creek off the Helford River is different. Louder and less scritch-scritch-scritch, more thrrreeep-thrrreeep-thrrreeep.
It’s almost birdsong. So much so that I run the Merlin bird app, which gives a resounding ‘Nah, mate’.
An evening of googling and listening confirms to me that what we heard were field crickets. But googling and reading then confirms to me that field crickets don’t exist in Cornwall – and barely in the UK.
Forty years ago there were fewer than 100 left in the country – all hanging out at one field cricket retirement home in West Sussex. Reintroduction programmes have since brought them back to other parts of Sussex, as well as Surrey and Hampshire. But not Cornwall.
Field crickets ruled out, the similarity to birdsong – and a growing suspicion that Merlin was winding me up – leads to the thought that grasshopper warblers were hiding in the grass. Until I came to write this and discovered a BBC News item published days after our walk headlined: ‘Field cricket introduction experiment in Cornish meadow’ and suddenly all became clear.
The article revealed that biologists from the University of Exeter last year introduced 70 Spanish field crickets to a meadow near the Helford River. It quoted Professor Tom Tregenza saying that the species had last been recorded in Cornwall in 1906 but he thinks there are now around 1,000 in the field – potentially more than exist across the whole of the rest of the UK – “which is very exciting”.
It is exciting. It just would’ve been more exciting to know that at the time
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Basking sharks seen on this walk: 0
Total basking sharks seen to date: 0
If you understand this reference, we can be friends. If not, well, that’s OK too, but you could always do some research.
‘Finger along a comb’ isn’t so far removed from how crickets chirp. Field crickets are like a one-man band. Flexing their wings rubs a plectrum on one along a set of teeth on the other, the energy from which causes a harp to vibrate, producing their song. All while playing a harmonica and clashing cymbals between their knees.
Goodness that really IS exciting. But then I also get absurdly excited when I travel 400 miles south and spot a lizard. For such a small country, we have astonishingly different habitats and wildlife scattered about.
1. If you understand this reference, we can be friends. If not, well, that’s OK too, but you could always do some research.
Or I could be your brother!
What a lovely piece of detective work. I shall be listening more carefully to the fields around us from now onwards... after all, crickets jump, don't they?