Field cricket

The field cricket is a chunky, shiny insect, black or brown with a splash of yellow at the base of its wings. It is about two centimetres long, roughly the size of your thumbnail. Field crickets live in sunny, dry grasslands and heathlands across Europe, hopping and walking through the short grass.

Field crickets are famous for their cheerful song. On warm days and warm summer evenings, the males chirp and chirp to call for a mate. They do not sing with their mouths at all. Instead, a male rubs special ridges on his wings together, a bit like running your thumb along the teeth of a comb, and out comes his song.

Each male field cricket digs his very own burrow, a little tunnel in the ground, and he can do it in just a few minutes. He sits at the doorway of his burrow to sing, keeping it safe and cosy. Females do not build burrows. They wander through the grass, listening, and follow the chirping until they find a singing male.

Field crickets cannot fly. Even though they have wings, the wings are made for singing, not flying. So a cricket walks everywhere it goes, and a busy one can travel up to about 100 metres in a single day, which is a very long journey for such a little insect on foot.

Around the whole world, field crickets are listed as Least Concern, which means there are plenty of them. In some countries, though, such as Britain, they had become quite rare as their grassy homes disappeared. Kind people have been restoring heathlands and gently moving crickets to new places to help them sing on.