Counting Two-spotteds

The night-singing insects, most of them crickets and katydids, are really putting on a show, and these warm and humid evenings, it's a wall-to-wall, well, tree-to-tree, orthopteran soundscape. The problem with so much aural richness is that it's often tricky to know the identities of the contributing musicians. Some, like the Common True Katydids that rasp out their "katy-did" names from the treetops, rise above the crowd, but most of the singers blend anonymously into a chorus with a cast of millions. Occasionally, however, you get lucky, and so it was when I ventured out at around 10:30 in the evening. I figured I ran no risk of sunburn then, and, as if to say, "Good call," a pair of Two-spotted Tree Crickets was courting by the basement door. I actually heard them before I saw the insects, and when I zeroed in on the "buzzy, dry trill broken with short pauses," as described by John Himmelman in his masterful Guide to Night-singing Insects of the Northeast, the lighter-colored male had his tegmina raised and moving the wings together, scraper on file, to make the distinctive sound. There was mist in the air, so I couldn't shoot with the dSLR, but my faithful weatherproof Fuji was up to the challenge of capturing the solo concert.