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, (Ecantheus 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 antennae 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 
Fig. 229. 
Fig. 228. 
Fig. 228 .—(Ecanthus fasciatus, male. (After 
Lugger; natural size indicated by line.) 
Fig. 229 .—Orocharis saltator, female. (After 
Lugger; natural size indicated by line.) 
country; one, O. fasciatus (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 larvte of various insects. Its eyes are also like those of the mole, 
