Chirping Crickets

Chirping Crickets

It's late in the summer. The day is nearly over. The sun hangs low in the sky. Listen! The crickets are loudly chirping.

You can hear crickets chirping almost everywhere -in parks and woods, in fields and on lawns, along country roads, even inside your house. It is the male crickets you hear. They usually stay in one spot and call the females to them. Most of the females cannot make sounds.

A male cricket does not chirp with his voice. He makes a chirping sound with his front wings. Each wing has a sharp edge called the scraper. The wing also has a long, bumpy vein called a file. The cricket lifts up his front wings and rubs the scraper of one wing against the file of the other wing. Chirp! Back and forth he rubs his two front wings. Chirp! Chirp! Chirp! Would you like to chirp like a male cricket? Get a piece of stiff paper and a nail file. Rub the file against the edge of the paper. The sound is almost the same as a cricket's chirp.

The " ears" of a cricket are not where you'd expect them to be. They are under the knees of the cricket's front legs! Each ear is a tiny hole with a tight, tissue-thin cover. Crickets hear chirping sounds through these tiny holes. This is what happens: The chirps make the air move, or vibrate. The vibrating air forms sound waves. The sound waves spread out to all sides. When they bump into the cricket's ears, the cricket hears the sound

A female cricket hears the male's chirps. She jumps toward the sound. Closer and closer she gets. Soon she is alongside the chirping male cricket, and they mate. Inside the female, tiny eggs start to grow. When the eggs are ready, she uses a long, pointed tube at her back end to make tiny holes in the ground. Then she lays her eggs inside the holes. The eggs look like tiny yellow bananas.