Niña de la Tierra: Child of the Earth

Even with the cool weather, I've been getting phone calls and emails reminding me that unsuspecting humans are meeting up (again) with our colorful and common - but sometimes alarming - Jerusalem cricket.

I received an email the other day from a resident of Sisters that went like this: "I saw the one that Chuck Stahn let bite him. (It's OK to let him know that I wasn't dumb enough to even touch this guy!) So, do you know what the heck this thing is? I tossed a pen down next to him for a size reference. He's big, and he's ugly."

I found this to be personally insulting; saying that a native Oregonian insect is "ugly" is like insulting one of my kids, so I wrote back: "Yes, it will actually bite, but with jaws, not the straw-like puncturing mouth part of the giant water bug. That beautiful insect is a loose relative of the grasshopper bunch; it's a 'weta,' of the unique family Stenopelmatoidea. They are non-venomous; the only way anyone can be injured is running into something solid in a mad-dash to get away from one."

But our curious neighbor replied: "Thanks for confirming my belief in NOT touching large creepy crawly things! And thank you for identifying it. Obviously you and I have a very different definition for the word 'beautiful.' My use of the word usually involves certain female members of the Homo Sapiens species! Sorry, but this overgrown cricket is still ugly to me."

What nerve.

The Jerusalem cricket is a large (total body length of up to three inches) colorful, flightless insect native to the western United States, and south into Mexico. They come equipped with a reddish head that looks like a human skull, reddish-orange thorax, abdomen with black and white stripes, and six brightly colored legs.

Early entomologists eagerly naming insects wondered where to put them in the zoological order of things. Many of these early bug-counters thought they looked like king crickets of Australia and the weta of New Zealand, so your guess is as good as mine how the name "Jerusalem cricket" stuck.

Despite their name, they are neither true crickets nor true bugs and, contrary to one of their names, they do not prefer to eat potatoes: raw, deep-fried, rotten or frozen.

They are usually active at night, but I have seen them out in broad daylight on several occasions. Their highly adaptable feet are used for burrowing beneath the soil to feed on decaying root plants, dead grasshoppers, and dead gophers.

Similar to true crickets, Jerusalem crickets produce a song of sorts during mating, a drumming sound in which the insect beats its abdomen against the ground.

In spite of their Spanish name, "niña de la tierra," they DO NOT cry like a baby.

Hoary and big brown bats - summertime residents of Central Oregon - prey on Jerusalem crickets like there's no tomorrow. I'm sure it isn't a mere coincidence that those big bats show up just about the time all those sexually inspired crickets head out at night for their annual night-time escapades.

Most males with sex on their mind aren't the brightest of bulbs, and probably aren't thinking they're easy prey for bats. In any event, if you step out to your front porch some morning on the way to work and find a pile of Jerusalem cricket heads and little black piles of poop under the roof overhang, you can be sure your home is also a bat's weta restaurant.