INSECTS
Fig. 42. The jumping bush cricket, Orocharis saltator
Upper figure, a male; lower, a female
cricket, Orocharis saltator (Fig. 42), who comes on the stage late in the season, about the middle of August, or shortly after. His notes are loud, clear, piping chirps with a rising inflection toward the end, suggestive of the notes of a small tree toad, and they at once strike the listener as something new and different in the insect program. The players, however, are at first very hard to locate, for they do not perform continuously—one note seems to come from here, a second from over there, and a third from a different angle, so that it is almost impossible to place any one of them. But after a week or so the crickets become more numerous and each player more persistent till soon their notes are the predominant sounds in the nightly concerts, standing out loud and clear against the whole tree-cricket chorus. As Riley says, this chirp "is so distinctive that when once studied it is never lost amid the louder racket of the katydids and other night choristers."
After the first of September it is not hard to locate one of the performers, and when discovered with a flashlight, he is found to be a medium-sized, brown, short-legged cricket, built somewhat on the style of Gryllus but smaller (Fig. 42). The male, however, while singing raises his wings straight up, after the manner of the tree crickets, and he too, carries a basin of liquid on his back much sought after
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