It's the most wonderful time of the year! When you can walk along a trail and see hundreds of springing grasshoppers cascade ahead of you, wave after wave of tiny hoppers leaping in every direction. Some land on the sidewalk with a click, some grab a tall stem and peep around it at you, some catch a blade of grass momentarily before rapidly descending to the ground in a surprisingly coordinated rappel.
The Greenway seeming a little sparse in the springers, I headed over to Terry Trueblood Recreation Area, which was an amateur orthopterist's heaven. The sandy soil around the lake, with wide swaths of Little Bluestem, Sideoats Grama, and other low-growing prairie plants along the trail, made for an interesting contrast with the moister/shadier and a bit weedier Greenway.
The plan was to take pictures of grasshoppers. All kinds of grasshoppers! My hope was to find another Admirable Grasshopper, such as the one I encountered at nearby Sand Prairie a couple of years ago. They are not rare, but they are unusual enough (to me anyway) to stand out amid the more numerous specimens.
It was a dry, sunny day; the air filled with songs of cicadas and katydids punctuated by the percussion of fleeing grasshoppers ticking against foliage. The occasional rhythmic whir of wheels or thuds of footsteps indicated a passing human. Have you seen an Admirable Grasshopper? I wonder wordlessly in their direction. I don't care to imagine what they may have been wondering in my direction in return, as I hunkered red-faced and dripping in sweat, to peer at the ground.
Like taking photos of swallows in the sky, it can be a little tricky to pick out a single grasshopper out of hundreds on the move and follow it to a landing point to take a picture. I began with taking a shot of every grasshopper I could focus on, and quickly discovered that they were all the same: Red-legged Grasshoppers (Melanoplus femurrubrum).*
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| Red-legged Grasshopper |
To be more discriminating I watched how they hopped. Some took broad leaps of a meter or more, going high above the ground. Some took sad little tiny hops, frantically trying to get away from the giant blundering about. Some jumped in the air and spread their wings to glide gently to a landing on the ground.
Taking the time to stop and stalk, I encountered this handsome charcoal-colored individual, a Clouded Grasshopper (Encoptolophus sordidus). The banded femurs and interesting eye colors made it easy to see it wasn't like the others.
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| Clouded Grasshopper |
The robust Differential Grasshoppers (Melanoplus differentialis), a smooth porcelain green with black chevrons on their femurs, were fairly common, peering from the greenery.
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| Differential Grasshopper |
A walk in the mowed grass alongside the paved trail proved to be a good strategy to flush some hoppers out of the grass and onto the trail, where I could get a good look at them. One of the first to appear using this technique was a little guy...even from several feet away I could see something a little different about it: the silhouette was unlike all those I'd been seeing so far, with a decidedly slanted face. Could it be...?
A glance left and right to see if any cyclist might unwittingly scare (or squish!) my target, then a few quick snaps, circling to get a good look. It was! An Admirable Grasshopper. What a beaut.
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| Admirable Grasshopper |
More photos, of tiny nymphs with nubs for wings. Some bright grassy green, others a little more yellow, and others a subdued tan with black stripes; IDs difficult, especially for nymphs, but possibly more Red-legged and maybe Two-striped Grasshoppers?
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| Assorted grasshopper nymphs |
I saw several grasshoppers holding themselves high off the pavement, as if to try to keep their bodies cool from the sun-baked surface:
And finally one more individual that looked just a little different, with wonderful dark mottling and grassy green stripes highlighting its wings and pronotum, with a fainter wash of green on the face and femur. Tentatively a Slant-faced Pasture Grasshopper (Orphulella speciosa), though the slant of its face doesn't appear nearly as extreme as that of the Admirable Grasshopper!
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| Slant-faced Pasture Grasshopper |
Circling around to the boat ramp area where the grasses and forbs reached far overhead, much taller than the low grasses along the trail, the grasshoppers continued their popcorn leaps. The height of the greenery brought many of the leggy arthropods up to eye level or higher, a unique opportunity for us to eyeball each other on equal footing: their inscrutably faceted compound eyes and my watery orbs in contemplation at the vastly different ways we experience the same world.
* As a non-expert, I have attempted to verify as closely as possible with resources at hand, including iNaturalist and those listed below, but welcome corrections and alternative suggestions!
