David Williams has just written and illustrated the new AIDGAP guide to Orthoptera and Dermaptera. Here David answers our questions about the guide and shares his experiences of finding, photographing and identifying grasshoppers, groundhoppers, crickets and earwigs.
What’s the new guide about?
AIDGAP Orthoptera and Dermaptera is about a small group of insects which are generally pretty large and easily identified, but they are often taken for granted. Many are expanding their range quite rapidly, alhough the Common Green Grasshopper may be declining in the south as the climate warms.
I hope that it will help people to identify the species that they see and give them an introduction into their lifecycles and habits.
If you have never looked for Orthoptera and Dermaptera before, how do you start?
The grasshoppers are probably where most people would start. Wait until they are adult! Nymphs are much more difficult to identify and the very young ones frequently impossible. It is worth bearing in mind that grasshoppers are not solitary creatures. A field containing grasshoppers will probably have hundreds of them in there. So although any individual grasshopper may be confusing, by the time you’ve seen your 20th one you should be getting an idea of what they are. Was that a male Lesser Marsh? Might be, but if you’ve definitely identified countless Meadows and no other Lesser Marshes, it probably wasn’t.
One thing I would urge, if you are able to do so, is to familiarise yourself with the calls of the crickets and grasshoppers. We are fortunate that all of our widespread species have distinctive calls. It makes everything so much simpler! Going back to the Lesser Marsh / Meadow example, they can sometimes look fairly similar, but the males have very different songs.
Orthoptera calls
There are a many good sound recordings on the internet (such as Orthoptera Recording scheme). The iRecord Grasshoppers app has examples for each species (App Store link |Gooogle Play link).
With the crickets (and to some extent the grasshoppers) the ability to hear them diminishes as we age. Until my mid-30s I could hear all the crickets except for Speckled Bush-cricket. For that you need to be a teenager with perfect hearing, and even then it needs to be sat on your shoulder!
I first realised I was losing them when, in my early 40s I visited a known site for Bog Bush-cricket and was alarmed that they were completely silent. Where had they all gone? I returned later with a bat detector and discovered the answer. They were still there, but I could no longer hear them. I was relieved and dismayed at the same time! I am now 53 and find that I can still hear Dark and Roesel’s easily, Bog faintly at close range (less than 2 metres) and Long-winged Conehead very faintly at very close range only (1 metre or less). But with a bat detector I can discover them all at maybe 20 metre range. My ability to find Speckled Bush-crickets has been transformed by the detector. I frequently never see them at all, but know instantly that they are there by picking up the calls.
Of course, the detector can also help you to home in on the singer. It makes it easier to actually see him (or her, in the case of Speckled Bush-cricket) should you wish. In this respect the iRecord app is a bit disappointing because it only features ‘natural sound’ recordings. Calls processed through a bat detector sound different because the pitch is modulated downwards. Nevertheless, the small number of species means that all the calls can be learned quickly enough.
Earwigs (Dermaptera)
I should mention the earwigs. There is so much still to learn about this group, but so little readily available information. Fortunately the new AIDGAP guide to Orthoptera and Dermaptera features all 4 species found in Britain and Ireland.
Earwigs are mostly strongly nocturnal. But they can be found in daylight by searching likely roosting places. Anywhere they can cram themselves into a small, dark space has potential. Beating and sweeping will help find the odd ones which are out and about. Nocturnal searches by torchlight though can often reveal them in much greater numbers than would otherwise be suspected.
In the book’s introduction, you comment that “many experienced entomologists baulk at the identification of grasshoppers”. Why do you think this is?
The honest answer is that I don’t really understand it. Grasshoppers in particular are quite variable in appearance. But they are no more varied than, for example, the Common Froghopper. Or indeed many moths (think of Common Marbled Carpet or Mottled Beauty for example).
Bug or moth specialists navigate their way through these variations by looking for key features. This method is exactly the same for grasshoppers (and usually rather simpler in fact). The British and Irish fauna is so small that there will only ever be one or two alternative species.
I do think that many entomologists, particularly (if I dare say it) the “old school” ones, want to identify everything down a microscope with a dichotomous key in hand. This is just not the appropriate way with our native Orthoptera and Dermaptera. They are much more akin to, say, Odonata in being identifiable in the field.
Perhaps the single exception is the Slender/Cepero’s Groundhopper pair. But even they can be identified from good photos or with a hand lens in a specimen pot.
Do you have any tips for photographing grasshoppers?
For a start I’d say choose your weather. Hot, sunny days will see them supercharged and difficult to get near. The best conditions (and this applies to most diurnal insects) is intermittently sunny / cloudy weather with lower temperatures (say 18-20°C). This makes insects bask in the sunny intervals, when they will be both more exposed and easier to approach (with care).
Generally speaking male grasshoppers are more cautious and faster moving than females. They have to be, as they spend most of their lives making a loud noise to attract females – which of course also attracts predators. In most species therefore, females are easier to chance upon and a bit slower to disappear, making them easier to photograph. On the other hand, you can’t locate females by sound.
If you really need to get that shot in unhelpful conditions, a camera which allows good magnification at a large working distance is the best option. I’ve used my 300 mm telephoto lens to get things like Large Marsh Grasshoppers, Grey and Great Green Bush-crickets at 1.5 metres away. I usually use a relatively low-powered macro set-up with a working distance of perhaps 30 cm for grasshoppers. Trying to capture them with a phone, which needs to be almost on top of them, is always going to be tricky unless they are very cold!
And finally, how did you first become interested in the Orthoptera and Dermaptera?
The classic childhood route from birdwatching to butterflies and moths and then on to insects in general. Somewhere in my 20s I tried to find field guides on insect groups other than Lepidoptera. I found only three (it was the 1990s – how times have changed): The still magnificent Stubbs and Falk guide to British Hoverflies, Cyril Hammond’s Harley Books tome on dragonflies and its sister publication, ‘Grasshoppers and Allied Insects of Great Britain and Ireland’ by Marshall and Haes.
I set about recording these three insect groups and soon discovered than in my native Shropshire all three were under-recorded. But the Orthopteroids were the least well recorded of all whilst having the fewest species. Around the same time I discovered that something mysterious was making chirping noises on warm summer nights in the shrubs around the car park of my local pub. It reminded me rather of being somewhere abroad with the constant noise of cicadas and so felt a bit exotic and mysterious. Turned out to be Dark Bush-crickets. I was hooked!
When I became County Recorder in 2013 I’m afraid to say that I regarded the earwigs as a bit of an ‘add-on’. But I quickly realised that aside from the Common Earwig, no-one knows much about them. And yet they turn out to be fascinating creatures, with exceptional levels of maternal care. I have investigated the lifecycles of Lesne’s and Short-winged Earwigs to date but they remain a work in progress. They deserve to be appreciated much more than they are!
David Williams is an entomologist and naturalist, and is also the VC40 (Shropshire) county recorder for orthopteroid insects. The Orthoptera and Dermaptera guide is available now for a special earlybird price (until 31 July 2024).