This ovipositor allows her to deposit 100 eggs or more that look like gray or purple rice grains just below the soil surface. They have long antennae, and each female has what looks like a long curving stinger extending from her abdomen.

They next swept over peas… took everything clean.” These hordes of insects were not new to the area, however, as we know that explorer Peter Skene Ogden noted “crickets by millions” in his 1825 journal account over 20 years earlier.ĭid you know that Mormon crickets are not crickets, grasshoppers, or cicadas, but large shield-backed katydids that walk or hop rather than fly? Their smooth, shiny exoskeleton can be a variety of colors and patterns, like the reddish-brown female I chased and studied this summer in Fishlake National Forest. They first attacked a patch of beans…, and in twenty minutes there was not a vestige to be seen.

Lorenzo Dow Young captures a bit of the incident in her 1848 journal entry: “May 27: …today to our utter astonishment, the crickets came by millions, sweeping everything before them. I cringed as I watched thousands of these creatures hopping across the mountain path that afternoon, and I understood how merciful those California gulls must have seemed, swooping in to gobble up the insects, as the Mormon pioneers struggled to develop a defensive, crop-saving plan as newcomers to this land.Ĭourtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, PhotographerUtah settler Mrs. How, I thought, could such a beautifully-sounding insect be the villain in Utah’s legend we know as the Miracle of the Gulls, memorialized in Minerva Teichert paintings and Temple Square monuments?ĭecades later, near Fremont Indian State Park, I met a Mormon cricket for the first time. …Eyes that looked worried grew soft and peaceful tongues left off chattering and ears full of the city’s rustling were rested by the cricket’s melody.” Combine this musical talent with Jiminy Cricket’s gentle reminder to always listen to my conscience, and it is no wonder that I would drift to sleep on summer evenings enamored with cricket songs. Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 3:21 | Recorded on August 23, 2021Ĭourtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, PhotographerChildren’s author George Selden described the impact of a cricket’s chirping in the bustle of a subway station in his book “The Cricket in Times Square” like this: “Like ripples around a stone dropped into still water, the circles of silence spread out.