Cricket chirps and cicada choruses: summer’s soundtrack

The iconic soundtrack of summer in the Highland Lakes is not heard through dashboard speakers—nature’s songs need no amplification. Burnet County is home to a chorus of insects, including cicadas, grasshoppers, crickets, and katydids.

The opening act of this lineup of micro-musicians is the cicada, which emits a distinct loud buzz or click from the morning into the afternoon by way of its tymbal, a special sound-producing organ. 

Cicadas are so boisterous, in fact, that they are considered the loudest insect in Texas. A chorus of cicada clicks and buzzes can register over 100 decibels and be heard from a mile away. 

Fun fact: Cicadas are often mistakenly called locusts. The brown shells found abandoned on trees are from cicadas.

Also daytime performers, grasshoppers make a soft, raspy, undulating sound that is a bit like sandpaper scraping together. This noise, typically produced by males, is made by the insect rubbing tiny spikes on its legs across the edge of one of its wings. Grasshoppers also make a loud clacking sound with their wings as they fly away. 

Fun fact: Stressed-out grasshoppers swarming and fighting for food and space can become locusts, which is a “gregarious phase” the insects enter rather than a separate species.

Evening sounds are orchestrated by crickets. Male crickets will chirp or trill anytime but are most often heard as dusk arrives. The melodic chirping sounds are produced when the cricket rubs the sharp edge of one wing along the serrations of the other wing. 

Fun fact: Female crickets do not make noises as they lack the special sound-producing parts on their wings.

Nighttime choruses are the work of katydids. The katydid, which resembles a green leaf, has a unique song that sounds like “Katy-did, Katy-didn’t.” Katydids, like crickets, rub their wings together to produce sounds. One difference, however, is that both male and female katydids make noise. Katydids hang out high in treetops and their songs tend to carry.

Fun fact: Katydids have wings but cannot fly. They walk everywhere they go.

Cicadas, grasshoppers, crickets, and katydids perform live all summer throughout the Highland Lakes of Burnet County, so come on over and enjoy the music.