160 Cockroaches, Locusts, Grasshoppers, and Crickets 



with more frequent pauses. At length finding all persuasions unavailing, he 

 brought his serenade to a close." 



From midsummer till frost comes there is a shrill insistent night-song 

 that makes familiar an insect rarely seen except by persistent students. 

 T-r-r r-e-e; t-r-r r-e-e, repeated without pause or variation about seventy 

 times a minute: this is the song of the snowy tree-cricket, or white climbing 

 cricket, (Ecanth^us niveus (Fig. 226), common all through the East and 

 Middle West. These crickets differ much from the better known robust, 

 black-brown house- and field-crickets in shape and color; the body is 

 about one-half inch long, slender, and the long wing-covers are so held, 

 when the insect is at rest, that the back (including the wing-covers) is widest 



behind and tapers forward to the 

 small narrow head. The body is 

 ivory-white tinged with delicate 

 green, and the wing-covers and 

 wings are clear. The antennas are 

 extremely long and thread-like and 

 have two slightly elevated black 

 dots on the under side, one on the 

 first segment and one on the second. 

 The females do much harm by 

 their habit of cutting slits in the 

 tender canes or shoots of raspberry, 

 grape, plum, peach, for their eggs. 

 The cane or shoot often breaks off 

 at the place where the eggs are 

 deposited, and by collecting these 

 in the late autumn or winter and 

 burning them many eggs will be 

 destroyed. Several other species 

 of (Ecanthus are found in this 

 country; one, O. jasdatus (Figs. 227 and 228), with three black stripes on 

 head and prothorax and usually dark body, is common in the Mississippi 

 Valley, and a third species, O. angustipennis, with wing-covers just one- 

 third as wide in broadest part as their length, is less common. 



Occasionally one finds on the ground, or more likely in digging, a curious 

 flattened, light velvety brown insect about an inch and a half long, with 

 the fore feet much widened and strangely resembling those of the common 

 mole, and altogether having an appearance strange and unlike that of any 

 other insect. This is a burrowing, or mole, cricket, which burrows beneath 

 the soil in search of such food as the tender roots of plants, earthworms, 

 and the larvae of various insects. Its eyes are also like those of the mole, 



FIG. 228. FIG. 229. 



FIG. 228. (Ecanthus fasciatus, male. (After 



Lugger; natural size indicated by line.) 

 FIG. 229. Orocharis saltator, female. (After 



Lugger; natural size indicated by line.) 



