Dusty

I was chasing butterflies around the dogwood this morning when R appeared, carrying a glass with a piece of card over the top. "Beetle?" I guessed, this being the type of insect we most commonly have to save from its own poor life choices by removing it from the house. "No," he replied. "Some kind of cricket."

Registering, but not stopping to comment on, the man who claims not to be able to remember facts apparently now knowing the difference between a cricket and a grasshopper, I interpreted the words "some kind of", as meaning that his find was unlikely to be a Speckled Bush-cricket, these being both common (I'd photographed two within the previous ten minutes) and easily recognisable. And on investigation, the by now irate contents of the glass turned out to be a male Oak Bush-cricket - a species I've only ever seen once before, just over a year ago.

"If you'd just dump him on the dogwood for me..." I said, gesturing at the shrub. "Are you sure?" said R. "I think he'll jump if I do." "No he won't," I said confidently. "They'd rather walk than jump." R was dubious, because the cricket had been quite antsy and hard to catch when he found it in the hall, and wasn't looking any more relaxed now. In the event we were both sort of right: he didn't jump, but took off fast across the dogwood with massive strides, and disappeared under a leaf. After turning the shoot over and getting R to hold it for me I rattled off a few record shots, and then we went away and left him in peace.

Half an hour later my meanderings around the garden brought me back to the dogwood, and I found the cricket still sheltering under the same leaf. This time when I uncovered him he sprang, but luckily only onto this stem, where he paused just long enough for me to grab a few extra images before stomping away into the depths of the shrub. He was still quite dusty, but very much cleaner, I must admit, than when he first came out of the house, when he was wearing dust bunnies like big furry slippers on several of his feet. This makes me suspect that he emerged from under the chest of drawers in the hall, where he could equally well have been either hiding from people or looking for food. Oak Bush-crickets are attracted to light, and if he flew in through an open door or window during the evening and got trapped when the house was shut up for the night, he'd have ended up both scared and hungry. Unlike most crickets this species is carnivorous, so searching out other, smaller insects to eat would have been quite high on his agenda, along with evading larger predators such as people, and looking for an opportunity to escape.