Grasshoppers, Crickets, and Their Nightly Backyard Symphony

Every summer evening, right around dusk, our porch turns into a concert hall. The crickets start tuning up first, then the grasshoppers join in from the tall grass near the garden. Dale always says it sounds like the whole yard's talking to itself. And in a way, it is. So why are they making all that noise? We’ll get to that in just a minute.

I always thought grasshoppers and crickets were basically the same insect. Turns out I was wrong, and once I started learning about the two, the differences are quite fascinating.

Grasshoppers are the daytime crowd. They love sunshine, have short, stubby antennae, and are strict vegetarians, munching their way through grasses and leaves from morning until the heat forces them to rest. Crickets are the nighttime group. They come alive after dark and have long, delicate antennae almost as long as their bodies. They'll eat just about anything, including plants, other insects, and even each other if food gets scarce.

When one launches itself at you while you're walking through the yard, it's really just trying to escape, not confront you. But after a grasshopper jumps, it can use its wings to fly away. Crickets mostly can’t fly, but can jump to get out of your way.

The way they make their sound is different too. Grasshoppers rub their back legs against their wings to get the chirping going, a trick called stridulation (a very big word for a small bug!). Crickets use a different approach and rub their two front wings together instead. Same idea, just a different technique.

Only the males do all that singing, by the way. They're calling for a mate, and each species has its own unique tune, almost like a signature song. If you're curious enough to try telling them apart, an app like iNaturalist can help you sort out who's who.

Their hearing might be the strangest part of all this. Crickets pick up sound through tiny eardrums on their front legs, basically hearing through their knees. Grasshoppers hear too, but not as well, since their eardrums are on the sides of their abdomen tucked under their wings.

And here’s a weird trick you can try. Temperature controls how fast crickets chirp, so if you count the chirps over fourteen seconds and add forty, you'll land pretty close to the actual temperature in Fahrenheit. It's called Dolbear's Law. But who sits around and thinks this stuff up? Obviously, Amos Dolbear in 1897. Very weird.

All of this adds up to more than just trivia, though. Grasshoppers help control plant growth by keeping vegetation trimmed, which shapes entire grassland habitats over time. Yes, they can damage crops when they swarm. But that's usually locusts, a type of grasshopper that turns destructive under crowded conditions, often caused by weather. And most grasshoppers and crickets seen in our yards don't swarm.

Crickets, on the other hand, act as nature's cleanup crew, breaking down dead plant material and returning nutrients to the soil. Both are also important food sources for birds, frogs, spiders, and small mammals. Take them out of the picture, and lots of other creatures go hungry.

The next time you hear that evening chorus outside your window, take a second to really listen. See if you can tell who's singing, a grasshopper or a cricket. Either way, you're hearing two tiny creatures doing big work for the world around us, one chirp at a time.

That's the kind of thing that keeps me endlessly curious about nature. There's always something new to learn about the wildlife hiding in plain sight, or in this case, singing in the grass.