Crickets chirping: That sweet, sad sound of summer's end

NOTE (added July 22, 2015):  My blog stats show that people keep getting here by searching for pages about crickets chirping in spring.  Crickets do not not chirp then, because they do not yet have their wings to make the sound.  So if you are hearing high-pitched chirpy sounds at night, it is most likely you are hearing Spring Peeper frogs or some similar species.  These make one of the first night sounds in early spring.  Read below about how and when crickets do chirp.

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I heard my first cricket chirp of the season last night.  I love this sound, but I always feel a pang of sadness as well, because it signals the beginning of the end of summer.  Here in Minnesota, the chirping usually starts in mid-August, but is a bit early this year, perhaps because of the unusually warm weather.   Hearing crickets early does not necessarily signal an early winter, because warm weather can speed up the life cycle of these insects.

Adult male field cricket
(courtesy of OrganicGardeningInfo.com)

Of course, crickets don't really know in a conscious way that fall is coming.  The reason they don't chirp earlier is that they don't yet have the proper equipment to make the sound.   Crickets go through a life cycle called direct development:  egg, immature stage, adult.

When they hatch from their eggs in spring, the tiny hatchlings already look like crickets, but do not yet have their wings.  As they grow, they shed their skins several times until they get wings in the last, adult stage.

And it is the wings that the male cricket rubs together to make his chirps.  (Common folklore has him rubbing his legs together, but that is not correct.)  You can get an approximation of the temperature in Fahrenheit by counting the number of chirps in 15 seconds, then add 40. The reason this works is because crickets, being cold-blooded creatures, are more active on warm nights than chilly ones.

The adult female cricket also has wings, but they are smooth and do not have the ridges that the male rubs to make the chirp, so she does not sing.  This is one way you can tell an adult male from a female.  You can also tell a female by the long stiff ovipositor extending from the tip of her abdomen, which she uses to lay her eggs in the ground in late summer or fall.  The adult crickets die off with the coming of winter, and the eggs hatch in the spring to produce a new generation.

In China and other Asian countries, crickets are considered good luck, and are often kept for pets in specially-designed cages.   Some European traditions hold that a cricket chirping in the house is a sign of future prosperity.  (I sure wish this one were true!)  When I was a child, I kept crickets in a terrarium in my room and enjoyed hearing them sing at night.   They ate vegetable trimmings (especially cukes and tomatoes) and often lived through the winter (which would not happen in the wild here.  Crickets die with the frost and their offspring winter over as eggs.)  Some of the modern "bug cages" now available would probably work just as well.  Just be sure to take good care of your crickets, the same as you would with any other companion animal.

2012 heat wave: Spring has never been so early here!

Lately the news has been full of photos of cherry blossoms and daffodils blooming a month early in places like Washington, DC.  Here in Pine County, Minnesota, things are not that far along yet, but signs of spring are still unseasonably early. 

On the right you see a bouquet of budding twigs that include (from left to right) forsythia, false spirea, pussy willows and black maple.  For many years it has been our custom to cut a bouquet like this for Passover, then watch as the buds slowly open during the eight days of the festival.  Well, this year we are going to have to do something different, because Passover is still almost three weeks away and buds are swelling now.

Nor are budding trees the only early signs of spring.  The Canada geese are back, along with robins, starlings,  red-wing blackbirds, song sparrows, juncos, mourning doves, and the phoebe who nests in the rafters of our shed each year.  Pheasants are calling, grouse are drumming, and last night -- believe it or not -- I heard spring peeper frogs and the ones we call "clacking frogs" calling in the marsh across the road.  This is the absolute earliest that any of this has happened here as far as I can remember.

Those swelling maple buds meant that I didn't get any maple syrup.  Normally you start tapping the trees when the days are around 40 degrees and the nights are still below freezing.  But when the temperature soars into the high 70s like it has done this March (smashing local records for days in a row), the nights stay warm, the trees bud out, and the sap flow stops.  Everybody I've talked to around here says the same thing:  Their maple trees dried up overnight.  I never even bothered to tap mine.  Which is probably just as well, because we are also in a drought.  All of our snow seems to have moved way down south.  Arizona is getting buried, while Minnesota stays high and dry.  We only got one decent snowstorm here all winter, and within days it had melted away.  Yesterday we got a nice steady rain, which was a good thing, because with all that dried grass around, not to mention some very early lightning storms, the fire danger was extremely high.

All of which adds up to one thing:  Climate change is real, and it is here.

Thousands of USA heat records broken -- new widget tracks them all

The weather has finally cooled down here in Minnesota -- at least for now.  Over 4000 heat records have been broken so far this summer in the USA, and the PBS Newshour site has developed this widget to track them all.   Use the scroll arrows to see records set by day, month, and year.  (You can get the widget code for your own site at:  http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/08/is-this-record-breaking-record-breaking-heat.html, where you will also find an informative article.   And yes, the widget will run year round, since records get broken in winter, too.)

 

As you can see, some of these records stood for more that 50 years.  Clearly this is a disturbing pattern -- and one that does not bode well for the future.  Global warming is here, whether the deniers like it or not.  Perhaps that's the REAL meaning of the endtime prophecy that says people will be "eating and drinking as in the days of Noah."  Maybe not gluttony as has been thought, but apathy in the face of warnings.   No doubt they laughed Noah, too: "A flood?  In the desert?  You've got to be kidding!" And we all know what happened to that generation.

And it's not just a matter of things warming up.   Climate change means weather patterns are changing, too.  Places that used to get rain are turning into deserts -- witness the drought and famine in Africa.   I remember hearing years ago that the monsoons in India were no longer coming reliably, but nobody heeded the warning.    Those same monsoons are what used to water the fields of Somalia.  And the southwestern USA (where a lot of these records are being broken even as I write) is experiencing the worst drought since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

On the other hand, Minnesota has been drowning in much more rain than usual.   Rivers reached record highs, there have been numerous flash floods and many more severe storms than usual.   Every time the Jet Stream takes an  abnormal plunge south, it sucks up moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and pulls it north.   Here in Pine County, MN, it rained just about every other day (sometimes several days in a row) in July.  I ended up growing a lot of my garden veggies in containers, because it was just plain too wet to till the ground.

Down the road from me is a cornfield that never got planted.  Lots of other fields lie fallow, too.   All of which is resulting in higher prices in the supermarket.   Parts of my lawn got so out of control I just let them go to seed and will mow it down for chicken bedding when -- if ever -- it dries up a bit.  Meanwhile, I struggle to keep up the mowing around the house and trails to the outbuildings.  Wild plants in general are huge -- I've got ragweed with inch-thick stems, eight-foot-high Jerusalem Artichokes (sunchokes), and enormous blackberry canes trying to take over my garden.

 On the other hand, pollination has been iffy.  There were very few wild berries in spite of all the rapid growth.  And not one wild plum on my trees.  Pollinating insects don't fly in the rain.  Some don't even fly on cloudy days.  And I have not seen one single honeybee -- not one!   Whatever is causing the demise of the honeybees has apparently reached here.  This spring, when I stood under my apple trees, I did not hear the happy buzz of honeybees, although some pollination did happen from other insects, because apples are forming.  The honeybee niche seems to have been taken over by a  species of small bumblebee, which I have seen on my cucumbers and squashes in large numbers.  Something is pollinating my tomatoes also, although there are fewer fruits than in other years.   And as I wrote in a previous blog post, the Monarch butterfly population crashed here this year -- I have not found one single caterpillar.

All of this is very disturbing, to say the least.  Nature will eventually adjust to climate change -- but will we?