Field Cricket Chirping Sound (Stridulation) ~ Gryllus campestris

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🔽 License the footage here:
https://1url.cz/juXQ2
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Hey, there's something chirping here. Is that a field cricket? No, wait, actually, it's more like a grasshopper. Or maybe a locust.

Does that confuse you, too? No wonder. It could even be a tree cricket or a mole cricket. In short, a member of the insect order Orthoptera, to which all these chirping creatures belong. In Czechia, we have several cricket species, even more grasshoppers and countless locusts... and most of them really do chirp. To untangle this a little bit, let's take a look at one of our most distinctive chirpers, which is striking in both its sound and appearance - the European field cricket.  

The field cricket is quite a large creature by insect standards. Many times I even get a little startled at what big black thing is running around in the grass under my feet when I am lucky enough to see one. It's our largest cricket species and the only one that digs deep burrows in the ground. These serve as a hiding place, but also as an amplification tool for the loud chirps the males make in the spring. Crickets live the other way around from, say, burrowing spiders - there, the females usually stay at home in their burrows and the males have to find them during breeding season. In crickets, on the other hand, girls leave their burrows during spring and go in search of suitors, who lure them from their haciendas with that lascivious chirping. Or rather, stridulation, to call it a bit more professionally. How does such a stridulation actually work?

Just listen to the song by the Czech band Buty, which explains it beautifully, "I'm a cricket and I'm just chirping, chirping by rubbing my wings." As unbelievable as it sounds, the Orthoptera really do make such distinctive sounds by rubbing one wing against the other. In the video, you can see for yourself that the cricket isn't holding any fiddle in its paws that we know from many fairy tales. Too bad, but that's how the world is.  

Field crickets, like many other insects, are suffering from the poor state of our agricultural landscape. They like sunny meadows, steppes and sparsely overgrown meadows, which the Czech countryside lacks, so even crickets are significantly fewer than in the past. Traditionally, the strongest population is found in southern Moravia, in the rest of the country they are found rather sporadically. However, during warm spring days and evenings you can check the presence of crickets in your region quite easily, because their chirping is virtually unmistakable and in good conditions can be heard from a surprisingly long distance.

For several years I had planned to document the stridulating of the field cricket, but mostly I encountered only shy individuals who refused to perform in my presence. It was only last year that I found a nice meadow with lots of burrows, whose owners were quite forgiving. So I chose the least overgrown burrow with a good view and spent two afternoons in June filming the landlord there.

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✿ Species
European field cricket (Gryllus campestris)

✿ Location and date
South Moravia, Czechia | June 2023

✿ Equipment
Panasonic GH6
Panasonic S5 II
Sigma 105
Olympus 12-100
Laowa 24 Probe
Zoom F3
Sennheiser MKE 600

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European field cricket | Gryllus campestris | Cvrček polní | Feldgrille | grillon champêtre | grillo campestre | Полевой сверчок

#europeanwildlife #grylluscampestris #cricket