Last night’s glorious moon kept me awake long enough to notice the cricket chorus that has been getting stronger and will soon be dying with the season. (This is a picture of a Katydid, not a cricket, but they’re prettier so I thought I’d use one instead.) This very noticeable chorus catches our attention in Autumn, because I’m told the male is trying to attract a female to get her pregnant so she can lay eggs before dying in winter. The eggs will hatch in March and go through about 7 transformations before working up to their own cricket status a few months later.
The cool thing you must try about crickets before they are silent until next summer requires a second hand and a child’s mind. One of these is fairly easy to find, the other you can borrow if you need to.
Did you know you can tell the temperature with crickets? Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to count the number of chirps in a 14 second period. (While you do this you’ll notice that they’re ALL IN Sync which should be a clue.) Then get the number and add 37 to it and that will be the temperature in Farenheit!
So last night there were about 19 chirps in 14 seconds, and adding 37 means the temperature was about 56 -which google tells me it actually was. Try it yourself before they slip away for the season, and think about what it might mean to be born, transformed, mate, give birth, and die all in about nine months.
Speaking of which, it made me think of this, (and in terms of the random things of value you might pick up from this quirky beaver website, the tales of archy and mehitabel are truly among the most vivid.) (Typo alert: these important names are typed without capital letters on purpose, since archy was a cockroach who could only jump on one typewriter key at a time – a free verse poet in a former life he left poems on don’s typewriter at night including tales of his good friend mehitabel the alley cat, the story goes), Oh! he was a fine invention and muse for author Don Marquis in 1916.
whirl mehitabel whirl leap shadow leap you got to dance till the sun comes up ‘cos you got no place to sleep
