Songs of Insects

Snowy Tree Cricket (Oecanthus fultoni)

Song of a Snowy Tree Cricket. A continuos, measured series of chirps.

Perhaps the most familiar of our tree crickets, the Snowy Tree Cricket is the one whose chirp rate can easily be used to estimate the temperature. One popular formula is to count the number of songs given in 13 seconds, and then add that number to forty to yield the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. It is referred to as “snowy” because individuals are often so pale that they appear white. Snowy Tree Crickets sing from brushy understory plants at the margins of woods or within open woods. During cold spells, they can be found close to the ground on the trunks of small trees — here they probably find a warmer micro-environment.
 

Base of antennae.

Snowy Tree Cricket

Song: Song is a very pleasant series of evenly spaced chirps, each chirp consisting of 8 (occasionally 5) pulses at a frequency of 3 kHz. Males prefer to sing from the underside of branches or broad leaves.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The image shows the oscillogram at the top in green and the sound spectrogram at the bottom in orange. This male Snowy Tree Cricket is singing at an ambient temperature of 73F. ©Wil Hershberger.

The image shows the oscillogram at the top in green and the sound spectrogram at the bottom in orange. This male Snowy Tree Cricket is singing at an ambient temperature of 55F. Notice how much lower the pitch of the song is at cooler temperatures (nearly 800Hz) as well as how the pulse rate drops significantly. ©Wil Hershberger.

Sonogram of a Snowy Tree Cricket. © Wil Hershberger.