Field Cricket

• In the United Kingdom it was once reckoned the country's most threatened cricket, down to barely 100 individuals in a single Sussex village in the 1990s.
• It eats plants, fruit, seeds and insects, including eggs, larvae and the remains of other animals.
• It digs individual burrows in dry grassland, heath and bare ground across Europe.
• The male sings from the mouth of his burrow, which acts as a resonance chamber and amplifies the sound. Each male defends his own hole, and the female chooses by roaming the grassland and judging the songs.
• It is one of the world's best-studied species in behavioural ecology: in a meadow in northern Spain, the WildCrickets project has followed every cricket in a population for years, individually tagged and filmed by cameras 24 hours a day, making it possible to reconstruct the complete life and breeding success of each individual.
• It hears through its front legs, as bush-crickets do.
• Its song is a continuous, musical trill, unlike the intermittent chirping of grasshoppers.
• It has disappeared from much of northern Europe with the abandonment of extensive grazing and the scrubbing-over of grasslands; in the United Kingdom it came to the brink of extinction and has been reintroduced.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat and environment

Dry grassland, heath and bare ground across Europe, where it digs individual burrows

Birth weight

A tiny nymph on hatching from the egg

Size at birth

A nymph like a miniature adult on hatching

Sexual maturity

After hibernating in the 10th or 11th nymphal instar and completing the final moult in spring

Gestation / incubation

~25 days for the eggs to hatch (laid between May and July)

Litter / clutch size

Hundreds of eggs per female over the season

Sources consulted: American Gardener; Fox Pest Control; PestInsight; AnimalHub; Grokipedia (Gryllus campestris); PMC (altitudinal reproductive investment study); The Insect Guide; Wikipedia (Gryllus campestris)