by Tom Shafer
January 22, 2025
So, I haven’t written anything in a while, and frankly, I have little to blame except for my sheer laziness and slothful nature. But here I am, once again, firing up my idle synapses, trying desperately to jumpstart my sluggish neurotransmitter to create a meaningful – or any – impulse of thought. In reality, though, back in the fall, I did complete a rough draft of sorts about crickets – actual crickets, but I never did quite finalize the process – which I intend to rectify here and now . . .
As Hallowe’en approaches and Mother Nature prods slowly along here in the northern temperate zone, I am well aware that winter is lurking around the corner. Now, to be honest, our winters here have been quite mild for several years, so “lurking” might be a rather extreme descriptor. “Loitering” might work better for my purposes.
Anyway, each evening as I slip into my hot tub, a nightly ritual for me year-round, the winter sky inches westward. This year, Jupiter, a sentinel of the fall firmament, leads the way, followed closely by the lovely Pleaides, a star cluster also known as the Seven Sisters. There are actually a thousand or so stars populating this cluster, all born from the same gas and dust cloud, but only six (or seven) are visible with the naked eye. Giant constellation Orion is just now awaking in the southeast and will soon dominate the overhead night sky. These late fall visitors are always harbingers of winter that is coming.
When I hot tub, I sometimes cool the jets – as in not running them – so I can listen to sounds coming from nature and my woods. On this particular night, a singular great horned owl is trilling his iconic “hoo-h-HOO-hoo-hoo” while coyotes are yipping and yawling down along the Little Miami River. I can also hear raccoons and possums rustling among the leaves, likely looking for grubs or bird seed kicked from our bird feeders. A few insects are making their own noises, including crickets that populate our deck area.
Using Dolbear’s Law, I know that the temperature tonight is around 54° – which is pretty mild for 1 a.m. this time of year. If you are wondering what Dolbear’s Law is, well, that’s why you are reading this. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, physicist Amos Dolbear noticed that crickets “chirped” at varying rates depending on temperature. Of course, in science class you learned that a cricket chirp is created by him rubbing his wings together. And if you were paying close attention, you noticed the “him” that I just used, purposefully because only male crickets chirp – which they do because, you guessed it, they want to have sex with female crickets. Anyway, as temperatures rise, these males chirp more, and Dolbear started counting the chirps. After many weeks of data discovery, he realized that if he added 40 to the number of chirps made by a single cricket in fifteen seconds, that number very nicely correlated with the actual air temperature (in Fahrenheit) within a degree or two. An unfortunate caveat to this law is that crickets don’t chirp under 50° because, apparently, they are warm-weather sex seekers. Maybe performance is an issue here, or the regrettable “shrinkage” factor that plagues many males of all orders, classes, families, and species – and Costanzas (think Seinfeld).
A few crickets have been entering the house through our back patio door and have quickly become hapless toys for our two young kittens. I save the ones I can by returning them to the backyard, and I do understand their draw to the relative warmth coming from our home. But the reality is that even if they survive the homicidal kittens, the crickets won’t survive their short mortality.
Typically, crickets live only ninety days, so they have a limited period of time to fashion meaningful lives (?) and procreate. They are nocturnal and live all over the world (except in colder climates above the 55th latitude), and they can survive – and thrive – in many types of environments. They prefer to spend days hiding in loose undergrowth or burrows that they dig themselves. And though a few species are herbivores, most are omnivores, so they’ll eat just about anything. However, given a preference, most favor chowing down on decaying vegetation or fresh leaves and flowers.
Of course, as all of us remember from our youth (and oldth, I suppose), crickets are great leapers – thanks to their powerful hind legs. They can jump three to four feet, which is quite remarkable. For some interesting perspective here, if a human were equally endowed with similar hind legs, he or she would be able to “fly” 300 feet! Makes me wonder why the Marvel universe hasn’t created a more mainstream cricket superhero, not unlike the Mormon Cricket Man, a book about a do-gooder half boy, half Mormon cricket.
But back in my hot tub, I am listening to two crickets, very close by, clearly communicating with each other, taking turns, mocking one another. It being a colder night (for crickets), I wondered what they were “talking” about. Were they competing for a bodacious female, hoping to procreate one more time before hopping off to that great cricket compost pile in the sky? Were they complaining about colder temperatures, the coming of winter? Or were they bemoaning their fantasy football teams, questioning once again the rationality of their early round choices? Of course, I speak little-to-no cricket (though I have been known to chirp about my own fantasy football team), so I have no idea what they were communicating. But I would like to think that they were good friends, just a couple of cricket pals trying to figure out what they were wearing to their Hallowe’en party. I’m thinking Crick-o-lantern or Crickenstein – or is it Cricket-o-lantern or Cricketstein. I suppose I’ll never know.