Sunday, September 20, 2009

EMPS: Some Kind of Cricket

It's taken me all week (again) to respond to Carly's Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot, this time asking for pictures of bugs. This was not just because of my two jobs and computer problems, but also because I wasn't encountering any bugs bigger than an underdeveloped grape seed. But then this guy (girl?) turned up in my bathroom:



Obviously this it a cricket - not the plain black kind I used to see Back East, but some kind of Arizona cricket with brownish stripeyness. Here's another shot:



I've looked up "Arizona Cricket" on Google, but the results are dominated by two groups that play the British sport, the wireless company and an arena named for the wireless company. There are pages about species of crickets, but mostly they're about a newly-discovered genus of cave cricket, which this isn't. But it is a cricket of some kind. Trust me.



I have a policy about bugs in the house, which for most species is that they give up their right to live if they enter the house. I have been known to rescue the occasional beetle, and I used to tolerate a tiny black variant of the ladybug until we came to suspect they were a different stage of the species of bugs that ate their way through a bunch of irreplaceable coats, hats, wizard costume and Toros baseball jerseys. But the main exception to the policy is crickets. I have never killed a cricket, and hardly ever even removed one from the house. This isn't just because of Chinese tradition and the superstition that they bring good luck. The main thing is that they eat other bugs - well, I think they do. And I find them kinda cute!

Karen

3 comments:

Suzanne R said...

Yes, I agree, they are cute, Karen. I've never had one in my house or seen one around here, although I hear them at night so I know they exist in the area. It's nice that you found one in your house. May it bring you good luck! Nice photos, anyway!

Liz said...

The last photograph says it all, as if the cricket wrote the words that accompany your entry and the text that lies at its' feet.
Reading the text requires a slight turn of the head and imagination 'to pay effective' attention to 'the entry' made by a bug that definitely has 'Pay Plan' and a card ending XX
Love it!

Mike said...

those are some long antennae! I'm used to the black crickets out this way. I've never seen any other color on a cricket.