The male’s song is described as a broken trill (one source described it more authoritatively as “ A plaintive, dissonant, buzzy trill at about 3.5 kHz, with a distinctive “screaming” quality.”). They are preyed upon by wasps, including grass-carrying wasps, of previous BOTW fame, which collect them to cache for their young. Both adults and nymphs feed at dusk and by night on the same diet of tiny insects, bits of leaves, pollen, and fungi (and the BugLady wonders if maybe the one on the screen was grazing on the algae that grows there). TSTCs have gradual metamorphosis – nymphs resemble the adults and there’s no resting/changing/pupal stage. Females have two dorsal spots males don’t. Unlike the Oecanthus, they tend to be pinkish, and the male’s wings are less flared. The cut of their jib is distinctly different from the other tree crickets. They aren’t seen as often as their Oecanthus cousins because they tend to live higher off the ground in dense vegetation, and males sing from the undersides of leaves. They are associated with oak, apple, maple, white pine, and a variety of other trees, and also with wild grape and sunflower. TSTCs, as one reference pointed out, are found over the eastern half of the country in approximately the same footprint as the original, eastern deciduous forests. Tree crickets, though they are (barely) capable of biting human skin, rarely do (in the BugLady’s experience, they’re too busy exiting the scene). There was a reference to a common name for the TSTC in Ohio – “itch bug” – that the BugLady couldn’t find anything more about. formosa), which barely makes it over the border and whose classification is a bit problematic. There are about a dozen species in the genus Neoxabea worldwide, but the TSTC is the only species north of the Rio Grande unless you count the Brownsville tree cricket ( N. Neoxabea are called the “smooth-legged tree crickets” because the Oecanthus have spines on their hind legs and Neoxabea don’t. According to, Neoxabea means “ new tree cricket” – Xabea being yet another tree cricket genus and the one that the TSTC was assigned to before it was an Oecanthus. The Two-spotted tree cricket ( Neoxabea bipunctata) (family Gryllidae) used to be grouped with the Oecanthus but was reclassified into the Neoxabea.

Today’s story is about that other tree cricket.

Oecanthus tree crickets, with a brief nod to the Two-spotted tree cricket, were celebrated in a previous BOTW. When they think of tree crickets, most people picture a delicate, flat, green member of the genus Oecanthus ( ). The BugLady had a visitor at her front door the other day – a Two-spotted tree cricket.

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Cricket bug