A Jiminy cricket on my hand?

Helena organised for her visiting sister Kate, her niece Jezzy and our local friend J. to go for lunch at a nearby pub, the Amberley Arms, where we’ve dined on several other occasions. What a treat. We all liked our food very much and it was my first meal out for ages.

We stopped off at the locally famous Winstones ice cream factory on the slopes of Rodborough CommonI to savour one of Stroud’s local delicacies. They decided to walk back down the hill and across the valley to where we live so I drove home and found I needed to have a snooze.

When I woke up Helena was back in charge of organising a major garden restoration project which included re-siting a couple of work tables to enable me to having a potting area, as well as removing the very large bay tree which had become a nuisance on the edge of the patio. I was rather shocked at the progress and what a difference it had made.

I made a cup of tea for everyone and brought out a camera to record the event. J. suddenly brought over a small branch of the bay tree which she placed delicately on the table with this small insect on one of the leaves. It started walking along the branch and then hopped down to the table and then up on to a potted plant. I started to take photos and rather delighted in getting up close to it. It didn’t seem to be trying to flee and was just exploring the new universe it had been placed in. After a few minutes I thought I should find a suitable plant to place it from whence it could much more easily find suitable protection in the garden’s vegetation. As the bay tree had ghone from where it was found, it might have a tough time ahead.

I tried to put it back on to a small branch to carry it to the vegetation but it hopped onto my hand. I moved over to some garden plants and tried to get it to hop off, but it only wanted to walk about on my skin. I grabbed the camera and took a couple of one handed shots. I rather like this memory of what I now think is a cricket. Looking at my picture I can see that the black spots at the centre of its eyes follow me as I move about, but I do think it was more inquisiitve than ‘scared’. 


When I first looked online to try to identify it I thought this was a Great Green Bush Cricket, but then after a little more checking found that it is most like a ‘Southern Oak Bush-Cricket’ found through this website which says:

It’s a lovely green colour, with bright yellow eyes and a yellow stripe down its back.  What makes it different from the common oak bush-cricket is that it doesn’t have proper wings – those orange dots on its back are all it has instead. It’s not actually all that new – it’s been here for about 10 years but it’s only recently started to spread out of London.  If you see one, the scientists at the Open University will be really interested to hear from you.  So will we!  You can let everyone know at www.ispot.org.uk.

According to the encyclopedia, it’s arboreal (ie “lives in trees”), nocturnal and carnivorous . In fact, it likes to eat caterpillars of the horsechestnut leaf miner moth which in turn feed on conker trees. Another fact about this bush-cricket is that it doesn’t sing like most bush-crickets and grasshoppers.  Instead it stamps its feet on leaves and makes a tiny  drumming sound, too quiet for people to hear.  Other crickets can hear this and so they all know where each other are. Bush-crickets are also called katydids. They look like grasshoppers but they’re more like real crickets.

And I separately found out a bit regarding the origins of ‘Jiminy’, ‘by jiminy’, ‘jumpin' jiminy’ etc — formerly often used as a mild oath often in the phrases by jiminy, jiminy crickets, jiminy Christmas

In a more innocent age, and long before the ubiquitous present-day usage of "f**k" as an expletive, there used to be some rather quaint expressions to express surprise, or shock. Among these are "Jiminy, or "by jiminy", or even "jumpin' jiminy". Some people claim it comes from the name of the Disney character Jiminy Cricket, but I can find references going back far beyond that, so I am guessing that the character was named after the exclamation (i.e. “Jumpin’ Jiminy”), rather than the reverse.