Letter From the Land: As Merry As Grigs |
| Male Buckell's Grig on ponderosa pine bark (after http://buzz.ifas.ufl.edu) |
In an English novel I enjoy there is a scene where a party of four adults and one child are about to embark on a bumpy carriage ride across France to be followed by a Channel crossing to England. The adults are mostly at odds with one another, and all are aware that the child suffers from motion sickness, but the child is excited about the trip, and says, buoyantly, “I daresay we shall all be as merry as grigs!” I have always wondered, so what is a grig, that they should be so happy?
According to our old American College Dictionary (Random House, 1963), ‘grig’ is dialect for “a cricket or grasshopper, a small or young eel, and a lively person. Origin uncertain.” Just for fun I looked up gregarious: “Of animals, living in flocks or herds, of plants, living in open clusters, not matted together, of people, fond of company, sociable. From Latin, ‘gregarious.’” No indication of a connection with grig, but I wonder.
When I was doing research last month on singing insects of our region I was delighted, while perusing the Web site for Singing Insects of North America, to discover a whole family of insects called hump-winged grigs. The taxonomists write that they gave this order the common name of grig to highlight the fact that they have been separate from the other families of katydids for 230 million years. What fun to be taxonomist and get to name things!
The hump-winged grigs (Prophalangopsidae) have a lot of members in the fossil record, but only three genera surviving today, two in Asia and one in North America. The North American genus is Cyphoderris, and all three species are forest species with a northwestern distribution. In our region we have the great grig, C. monstrosa, and Buckell’s grig, C. buckelli. The great grig lives in Lodgepole pine, Engelmann spruce forest, and is the faster singer (70 pulses per second). Males may climb several meters into the trees at night, probably feeding on cones. Buckell’s grig, which we probably have on Moscow Mountain, lives in Ponderosa habitat, up into mixed pine and Douglas fir forest, and sings more slowly (about 50 pulses per second). Males stay about one meter off the forest floor. (See illustration.) Both species spend the day in ground burrows. You can listen to songs of grigs and find out more about them at the Web site above. Select ‘katydids,’ and ‘species list.’ Look under both the species names and the name of the family.
I am always so excited when I find out about another plant or animal that has been living here, right alongside me, all this time without my knowing. I am starting to be able to recognize the songs of crickets and katydids (including grigs) now: I am sure I have heard the song of the grigs this last summer. On the night of October 18th I was walking in old growth Ponderosa woods and heard a song coming from around knee height. I think it was a cricket, but when I heard it, I was merry as a grig!
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