Crickets

Telling it apart

• Black to dark brown body, stockier and darker than a grasshopper, size 10–14.
• Very long antennae, often longer than the body itself — unlike a grasshopper's short antennae.
• Associated with wooded, shaded banks rather than the open fields a grasshopper prefers.
• A low, dark silhouette on the water, sitting nearly flat against the film.

The woods, not the field

Where the grasshopper lives in open fields and hayfields, the cricket prefers wooded banks, leaf litter and dense, shaded vegetation. Both insects fall into the water the same way — a misstep, a gust of wind — but rarely in the same spot on a given river.

That means looking for crickets on small, wooded, closed-in streams rather than the big open-bank rivers where grasshoppers dominate.

A dark shape rather than a splat

Unlike the grasshopper, whose noisy crash does much of the work, the cricket stands out mainly by silhouette: black, low, sitting nearly flat against the film. In shaded water under forest cover, that dark contrast is easy to spot, for angler and trout alike.

A quieter presentation than a grasshopper's still works well — no need to force the splat when the colour is already doing the job.

The season's last terrestrial handoff

The cricket takes over from the grasshopper late in the season, as nights cool and grasshopper activity starts winding down. It's often the last terrestrial worth trying before the calendar shifts to autumn's final aquatic insects, like Isonychia's second brood.

Keep a few in the box through mid-October, especially on small wooded streams.