Southerner

It's only three years since R found the first Oak Bush-cricket either of us had ever seen, on an iris leaf in the wildlife pond, but since then I've found them quite regularly on different trees and shrubs around the wild garden. As you can see from that earlier post, they're macropterous - that is, they have long, functional wings. Then a couple of weeks ago, while I was tapping the lower branches of the oak tree in the wild garden in an attempt to dislodge some weevils, I turned up a cricket that looked very similar to an Oak Bush-cricket, but only had vestigial wings. She was very unimpressed at being tapped out of the tree and quickly sprang away into the undergrowth, leaving me with just a single record shot, but that was good enough to establish that she was a Southern Oak Bush-cricket. Today I found this second female in the chestnut tree and happily, in contrast to the earlier individual, she was pretty calm about being moved around and photographed.

The Southern Oak Bush-cricket spread northwards out of southern Europe in the latter part of the last century, and was first recorded in the UK, in Surrey and Berkshire, in 2001. It reached Kent in 2005, Nottinghamshire in 2011, and was first recorded here in Worcestershire in 2019. Just how it has spread so rapidly is a mystery, given that it can't fly, and in the absence of a more obvious explanation there's a theory in currency that it's been hitching lifts on the outside of motor vehicles - which sounds ridiculous, but I suppose might just be true. I wonder if it uses the mapping app on its smartphone to decide the quickest route to its next target destination?

However it got here, the Southern Oak Bush-cricket seems to be doing pretty well. Like its native cousin, it's never found in large numbers, but that's unsurprising given that it's nocturnal, and prefers to hang out in trees. To make it even harder to find, the males don't stridulate, but stamp repeatedly on a leaf, in short fast bursts - you can hear a recording of this call on the species page of the Orthoptera & Allied Insects site. Should you be walking under a tree at night, and hear what sounds like a very small carpenter hammering in the branches above you, it might well be one or other of these Bush-crickets - and it needn't be an oak tree: any broadleaved tree can host them. According to NatureSpot the Southern Oak Bush-cricket is a known predator of the Horse Chestnut Leaf Miner, which makes the presence of this female on my red chestnut tree not merely explicable, but welcome.