Kankakee County

August 20, 2013 at 7:00 am (singing insects)
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by Carl Strang

The traveling singing insect survey took me to Kankakee County one day recently. It proved to be primarily an agricultural county, and I spent much of the day finding places to which I will not need to return. The county’s gem is Kankakee River State Park, and all the singing insects I had found elsewhere in the county also were there, a total of 15 species.

An attractive scene at Kankakee River State Park.

An attractive scene at Kankakee River State Park.

These included the first robust conehead and northern dusk-singing cicadas of the year. My past experience with that cicada was occasional songs during the day, from late morning through dusk, but those in the state park lived up to their name. None sang until about 15 minutes before sunset, but then many were singing. The robust conehead was a through-the-car-window identification. It was singing in an upland meadow, and there was no place to pull off. The only other possibility for that loud droning song after dark is the false robust conehead, but until I have confirmed the presence of the latter this far north I am inclined to go with robustus. At some point I will make a series of recordings to see if I can discover the more southern of these two sibling species in our area.

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Learning to Identify Insect Songs

September 27, 2012 at 6:12 am (methods, singing insects)
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by Carl Strang

One of the obstacles to a singing insect monitoring program is the large number of various songs that need to be learned for identification. This is not really much different from learning bird songs for breeding bird monitoring, however (except that the total number of species is smaller here). Instead of being daunted by the entire process, it is possible to take the learning process in stages, beginning with the songs that are common and easy to recognize, the ones you have been hearing all along but simply didn’t have the species labels. Here is a list of a dozen suggested species to start with in the first stage: spring field cricket/fall field cricket (their songs are identical), Allard’s and striped ground crickets, snowy tree cricket, common true katydid, black-legged meadow katydid, greater angle-wing, round-tipped conehead, dog day cicada, scissor-grinder cicada, and Linne’s cicada (for more information on these species, try the tags at the head of this post).

Snowy tree cricket, one of the species on the starter list

This list and those that will follow are for northeastern Illinois and northwestern Indiana. There would be substitutions in other parts of the country (I encourage readers elsewhere to make comments here with their own suggestions). Go to reference recordings of these species’ songs, either on-line at the Singing Insects of North America website or through the CD that accompanies the Songs of Insects book. It is not too late this year to hear many of the species on this list on the warmer days, though some are finished or nearly so.

My recommended species list to focus on in the second stage of learning consists of 8 species and groups of species: greenstriped grasshopper, gladiator meadow katydid, Roesel’s katydid ( three species that sing relatively early in the season), and then later, Carolina ground cricket, Say’s trig, sword-bearing conehead, two-spotted/narrow-winged tree crickets (no need to worry yet about separating the two), and the meadow tree cricket group (3-4 species whose songs are essentially identical to the ear and will remain so).

Roesel’s katydid is a species from the second-stage list.

This list of common species either will take you to additional, though still readily available, habitats, or else require a little more of a practiced ear (which practice you got with the first species group). In particular, seek out and spend some time getting familiar with the songs of the Carolina ground cricket and Say’s trig. They need a little more effort to recognize in the field, but once you have them, they will be touchstones for many other species (much as robin songs are for learning bird vocalizations). If you are starting now, you might push the Carolina ground cricket to the first list, as it is one of the few species singing on the cooler days and evenings.

Once you have mastered the second list of species, you are ready for the more subtle distinctions needed to distinguish the songs in the third species list. This includes separating out the song of Linne’s cicada from similar songs by the lyric cicada, and in some areas, swamp and/or northern dusk-singing cicada.

Linne’s cicada

Also, by this point you are ready to distinguish the two-spotted tree cricket song from that of the narrow-winged tree cricket. Also, the broad-winged tree cricket should stand out now from other long-trilling species. In addition, you no doubt have noticed and begun to puzzle out other species that are more idiosyncratic in their distribution or smaller in numbers that you have encountered in your favorite places.

And that brings you to the fourth stage, learning the songs of whatever remaining species may live in the area you wish to monitor. For this you will need a regional guide. In the Chicago region, you can meet this need with the guide I am developing. It is available for free as a .pdf e-mail attachment. Simply request it at my work e-mail address: cstrang@dupageforest.com

As you are learning and listening, pay attention to which songs you can hear clearly, and at what distances, and which are marginal. This will inform the limitations you will need to address or acknowledge in your monitoring.

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Scissor-Grinder

August 19, 2010 at 5:53 am (singing insects)
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by Carl Strang

The Tibicen or annual cicadas are a late summer phenomenon whose loud songs characterize the August days. Occasionally you may find a shed nymphal shell or a dead adult on the ground, but generally they sing out of sight, high in the trees. Last week at Mayslake Forest Preserve I had a rare opportunity to watch one in action.

This was a scissor-grinder cicada, singing only 10 feet up in a crab. The bright white underside perhaps explains its species name, pruinosa.

The cicada was walking around in the branches, singing at frequent intervals. In this photo it apparently is feeding, as its beak is extended.

The cicada was alert and watchful. As I moved within 15 feet for a closer photo the insect abruptly stopped in mid-song and was gone.

A few days later I found a dead one on the walkway near the chapel.

I have not seen a concentration of this species anywhere to match that at Mayslake. In the evening their EE-SHER-EE-SHER-EE-SHER-EE songs can drown out everything else. (Before I learned their conventional common name I used to call them lazy-dying-battery cicadas, as their song reminded me of a car engine whose battery was on its way out. This was to contrast them with the angry-dying-battery cicada, Tibicen auletes, aka northern dusk-singing cicada, whose song also is slow but has an edge to it).

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Tibicen Song Sorting

July 27, 2010 at 6:13 am (singing insects)
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by Carl Strang

My first entry into singing insects study came when I ran across the University of Michigan cicada website in 2003 or 2004. The site includes recordings of cicada songs, and as I played them I realized that all my life I had been hearing the distinguishable songs of several species without knowing it. These were all members of genus Tibicen, and that summer I recognized three common species in DuPage County.

They look very much alike, and are hard to see when singing high up in trees, so it was well that their songs were distinctive. After a couple years, however, I began to notice that the songs I attributed to one of the three, Tibicen linnei or Linne’s cicada, had two variations and with references I was able to distinguish a fourth common species, Tibicen lyricen, the lyric cicada. The differences among these species and their songs I described in some detail in a post last year.

Recently I was reviewing a wide range of singing insects reference recordings when I realized I need to pay attention again to the songs I have been identifying with Linne’s cicada. The swamp cicada, Tibicen chloromera, has a vibrato very close in speed to linnei’s. It has, however, a percussive quality in each vibration that sets it apart from linnei’s smoother, more wavelike vibrato. I had paid too close attention to written descriptions of the swamp cicada, in both the popular and scientific literature, which imply that chloromera is found only in wetlands and sings only from low perches. In fact I am now finding that at least around Culver, Indiana, chloromera often sings hundreds of yards from wetlands, and at least as often from high trees as from perches in lower ones. I have heard them in forests as well as more open stands. This is in keeping with other Tibicen cicadas, which at least in their singing perches show wide ranges in habitat.

So far I have not heard chloromera in DuPage County. I have found that I need to listen carefully, because when lyricen are singing their first, warmup songs of the day they have a slower vibrato with a percussive quality like chloromera’s.

The two areas I frequent most, DuPage County, Illinois, and Marshall County, Indiana, have different Tibicen species lists though they are only about 100 miles apart. Both are homes for canicularis, linnei, lyricen and pruinosa (the dog day, Linne’s, lyric and scissor-grinder cicadas, respectively). So far, only Marshall County appears to have chloromera, the swamp cicada, but I don’t consider the case to be closed. Marshall County also has a sixth species, Tibicen auletes, the northern dusk-singing cicada, which is associated with sandy soils and so does not occur in DuPage County’s clays.

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