The Songs of the Grasshoppers and Crickets of Western Europe

  • D. R. Ragge &
  • W. J. Reynolds
Harley: 1998. Pp.591Book £65, CDs £25

Singing grasshoppers and crickets have inspired poets, and have even been adopted as caged pets in certain Asian and European countries. Now the calls of those insects found in western Europe can be identified using this nicely packaged acoustic field guide, which includes keys to species, colour plates and compact discs. The insects included are from three taxonomic families that share the abilities to sing and jump but are genetically quite distantly related: Acrididae comprises grasshoppers and locusts, Gryllidae includes the familiar crickets of field and hearth, and Tettigoniidae is composed of the bushcrickets (known as katydids in North America and Australia).

The songs featured are almost all produced by males. This is not investigator bias but a fact of nature: those familiar buzzes and chirps of night-time walks and hot summer afternoons are mating calls. The role of the calls and how call patterns are made and heard are covered in the book's introductory chapters. But it is a rather modest, selective review, which provides neither an effective explanation for the mechanical basis of sound patterns nor any speculation on the origins of their “bewildering variety” — a virtual Morse code for the 171 species. Why did unique song codes evolve? Was it to prevent mismatings between taxa, or was it simply a by-product of other selection pressures within species?

But the intention here is to describe song codes and use them to identify species, and in this the book succeeds. The 400-page database of song patterns (call spectra, which are of diagnostic value in their own right, are unfortunately omitted) is a useful source of characters that could be traced onto proposed evolutionary trees of the Orthoptera, allowing a reconstruction of how these signals may have evolved within lineages of species. The identification guide will certainly be handy for naturalists and ecologists. Equipped with this book, a decent set of ears and a tape recorder, researchers can now quickly sample the abundance of species in various habitats without the bother of collecting and identifying specimens. Such methods have already been used in studies of the effects of habitat fragmentation in western Europe on the metapopulation dynamics and diversity of bushcricket species.

The pace of insect identification will, however, be slowed by user-unfriendly acoustical terms such as ‘macrosyllable’ and ‘echeme’. Ragge and Reynolds defend their jargon as “indispensable”, yet the book's title speaks of the “songs” of grasshoppers and crickets, not their echeme sequences. Other authors have described cricket calls using simple terms such as ‘pulse’, ‘chirp’, ‘trill’ and ‘song’; and, let's face it, ‘diplosyllables’ has none of the charm of the ‘chirps’ of Charles Dickens' The Cricket on the Hearth.

Despite the unhelpful terminology, these singing insects can be identified using the acoustic keys and tables in this book. (We tested them on a couple of European songsters that have invaded Canada.) Books that use sounds to identify regional singing faunas (which also include frogs, birds and cicadas) deserve a place on the naturalist's bookshelf alongside the more typical pictorial field guides. When packages such as this one, comprising books and compact discs, are available for more regions of the world, perhaps the identification of animals using sounds might one day rival the more traditional pastimes of spotting birds and butterflies using field marks.