In the 40 years that I have followed this steep, stony, path leading down to Tunstall reservoir, one moorland edge bank of fescues, betony and bell heather has always been a reliable spot for grasshoppers. Facing south-west, sheltered from wind by a larch plantation it’s a perfect place to sit on a sunny afternoon and listen to their soundtrack of summer.
You would need more finely tuned ears than mine to distinguish all 13 of our grasshopper species by their songs, but here I have only ever found two; the meadow, Chorthippus parallelus, and the common green, Omocestus viridulus.
The meadow grasshopper has a song that’s memorably described in one field guide as a “short, dry, chuckle”. But the male greens have a longer, more varied, repertoire; loud for attracting a mate’s attention, more subdued courtship music for wooing her, and a staccato song during mating.
This afternoon I could hear only isolated bursts of their chirruping, when the sun broke through clouds. There were few adults; most were nymphs in the penultimate stage of the four moults that lead to maturity. Only adults can produce the characteristic rattling song by dragging the little pegs on their hind femurs across the edges of their long membranous wings.
Catching nymphs, for a closer look, was not difficult. They can only leap and then crash-land, so it is easy to trap them in cupped hands as they climb through the heather to a jump-off platform. Winged adults, with their leap-flutter-glide skills, are more of a challenge.
After a hot chase I caught a female that had lost one hind leg, perhaps shed to escape a bird’s beak. The damage might make for lop-sided leaps but should not put paid to courting; there are reported instances of such one-legged fiddlers successfully completing a call-and-response courtship duet.
Back down in the valley bottom the air was filled with the scent of newly mown hay. A tractor with a cutter bar wended its way around a meadow in ever-decreasing orbits, leaving windrows of drying grass.
In the gateway I found a full-grown meadow grasshopper clinging to a flowering culm of tufted hair grass, fortunate to have developed wings just in time to escape the mower.
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