Every summer there's one night on the Mountain when I walk around a corner from the cool forest onto a ponderosa ridge, feel the warm rush of up-welling air from the valley, and hear a new sound. The Pacific treefrogs have ceased their choruses as the ponds have dried up; only an occasional individual calls "reek-eek" from a mountain spring. The new sound in the forest goes "chirt-chirt-chirt-chirt-chirt-chirt-chirt-chirt-chirt...," and infallibly makes me think of summer, and with a little chill, of fall. I have never known for sure what the little invisible chirpers of a summer night were; awhile ago I began calling them all categorically "crickahoppers."

It turns out there are three kinds of insects I might be hearing: crickets, katydids, and cicadas. Crickets and katydids are related to each other, and to grasshoppers (Order Orthoptera) Crickets and katydids make their songs by rubbing the ridged edges of the their forewings together. (Certain grasshoppers also make a sound, by rubbing a leg on a wing.) Cicadas (Order Homoptera) have a pair of sound organs in their abdomens called "tymbals'," with muscles running through them. Cicadas call by contracting those muscles. Crickets have a more "pure" and to us more musical "trill" sound, composed of a run of chirps, whereas both katydids and cicadas are buzzy or raspy. Crickets, although they can call 24 hours a day, are more often heard at night. Cicadas make their continuous buzz note in the daytime.

Cricket chirp speed varies with temperature; you can hear some samples of snowy cricket calls at temperatures from "hot" to "cold" by going to the U Florida site for the snowy cricket song: http://buzz.ifas.ufl.edu/585a.htm.

In all these singing insects the males call to reserve territory, and to assist the females to find them. The females have hearing organs with great sensitivity. Some predators make use of the calls of the males to home in on them and eat them. The female Osmia fly, for example, has hearing even more acute than the female cricket of the species it preys on. The fly locates the male cricket and lays an egg on him which later hatches into a larvae that consumes the host cricket. Where the cricket and fly overlap in range (in Hawaii) the male crickets call less obtrusively and in a more restricted, nocturnal time frame. Similarly, cicadas in Panama, where there are lots of bats, call more quietly and less often than cicadas elsewhere and thus apparently delay being made a meal of.

I'd like to learn more about what these creatures are eating on Moscow Mountain; so far most of my researches on "diet" have turned up lots and lots of animals and birds who have crickets, cicadas and katydids in THEIR diets! All these singing insects eat plant material, which may explain why my first computer searches turned up mainly exemptions to bans on certain pesticides to allow farmers to control, for example, Mormon crickets. "Cricket sounds" produced good leads. I have added a fat handful of interesting Web sites to "favorites" to return to for further exploration; "Sounds of Cicadas from Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia" has recorded calls and beautiful pictures. The expanding front of ignorance is a wonderful thing!

Accompanying this article are some pictures of singing insects you might hear on the Palouse.

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