SCOTT SHALAWAY Making the sounds of late summer?

As nighttime temperatures drop into the 50s, it's once again a pleasure to sleep with the windows open and no fans or air conditioners droning all night long. The sounds of nature lull me to sleep. An occasional barred owl may hoot in the distance or a screech-owl may whinny from an apple tree in the back yard, but it's insect sounds that dominate late summer nights. From late July until fall's first hard frost, nature's music of the night signals the end of each day.
Specifically, orthopterans monopolize the nightly concert. Orthopterans include the group of insects we commonly refer to as crickets and grasshoppers. Everyone knows the familiar black field cricket that lives in back yards everywhere. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has spent hours searching for a lonely cricket that turned the house into its own personal concert hall. From a distance, the field cricket's high pitched trill is soothing and pastoral.
But in the bedroom at 2 a.m. even a solitary cricket song can drive a sane person mad.
Katydid song
Another widely recognized late summer sound is the song of the katydid.
Katydids are large green grasshoppers. They often come to porch lights.
Their green textured outer wings look like leaves and provide near perfect camouflage for hiding in bushes by day. Katydids also have extremely long antennae that arch backward over the length of the body.
But the best way to recognize a katydid at night is by ear. Males sing from early evening well into the night. The song is harsh and burry and sounds something like "Ch-ch" or "Ch-ch-ch" or "ch-ch-ch-ch." The phrases are repeated about once a second, and the rhythm suggests the insect's name: Ka-ty, ka-ty-did or kay-ty-did-did.
Sometimes several individuals sing in unison to form a genuine chorus. Recently, on one of this summer's rare clear evenings,I listened for 10 minutes as two individuals called repeatedly, matching songs until they finally sang as one. And as I reviewed some recorded insect sounds one night, several live katydids outside the window sang in sync with the tape after just a few minutes.
The singer of the most familiar of the summer nocturnes remains a mystery to most people. Snowy tree crickets generate a seemingly endless series of high-pitched melodic chirps that to many define a summer night.
Impossible to find
Though often heard and recognized, snowy tree crickets are almost impossible to find without a diligent search. During the day they feed and rest amidst the foliage of trees and shrubs. Thanks to their small size and cryptic pale green color, they blend in with their surroundings. At night, their song has a ventriloquistic effect. Shine a light where you think the cricket is and invariably it's not.
It is the snowy tree cricket that is sometimes called the "thermometer cricket" -- count the number of chirps in 15 seconds, add 40 and you have the temperature in Fahrenheit.
I've tested this old saw, however, and suffice to say, I'll stick with a thermometer.
Orthopterans produce the sounds we hear by a mechanical process is call stridulation -- they rub one body part against another. In the cases of the species I've described, the body parts in question are the front wings. To "sing," they elevate their front wings and move them back and forth. Where the wings overlap, a sharp edge (the scraper) on one wing rubs against a file-like ridge (the file) on the other. Membranes on the wing act as a sounding board to amplify the sound. The process is not unlike the sound that resonates from the body of a violin when the bow is pulled across the strings.
To enjoy a soothing nightly concert for the next six weeks, just open the bedroom windows and enjoy nature's most soothing lullaby.
sshalaway@aol.com