This following italicised sections were written by Matt Phelps, who first heard
this unusual cricket...
I strolled over to Sussex Wildlife Trust's Waltham
Brooks reserve from home a bit before sunset on 13th July. It
was another balmy evening after yet another scorcher of a day. There had been a
few Night Herons popping up in other parts of southern England in
recent days and weeks so it was primarily this species I had in mind as I
approached the lake, especially as it was pretty much four years to the day
since the previous record of the species here. Aside from quite a few
Mallards and flyover Little Egret there wasn’t much going
on here, so I decided to start heading for home.
As I crossed the bridge
over the old canal my attention was immediately drawn to a loud
chirruping sound coming from somewhere ahead of me. I crept towards where
I thought the sound was coming from but, each time I felt like I
must be right on top of it, the source of the sound seemed to
move! I’m certainly not the world’s greatest expert when it comes to Orthoptera, but I was certain this wasn’t something I had
heard before. I scoured through some Juncus tussocks in the hope of
finding the culprit but could only find Lesser Marsh Grasshopper, so I decided
to record some video of the song for posterity before heading home.
The following day I sent the
video to Alice Parfitt, in the hope she might recognise it. I was
then off work sick for a couple of days and, as I hadn’t heard back
from Alice, the whole thing slipped my mind somewhat. I made a return
visit on the evening of 19th July and, sure enough, heard
the very same sound in the same place. Again, none the wiser to what it was or
where it was coming from! Funnily enough, Alice text me back a day or two
later to say she’d exchanged messages with the Sussex Orthoptera Recorder, Ralph Hobbs, who was a bit mystified, but suggested Tree Cricket.
Neither Alice nor I thought this sounded right at all, when compared to
recordings online.
Here’s where I come in. Last week at a Sussex Moth
Group event at Petworth Park, Matt showed me the above video he had taken a few days before. So I suggested we headed there
to look for it on the first day we could get out there together.
Sunday (26th July) night, Karen and I met up with Matt (later we were also joined by Steve Baines) and did a bit of casual recording before it got dark.
There was lots of nice things to see but we needed it to
get nearly dark before this cricket would start up.
Like clockwork, it did just that, and as we edged closer to it, it seemed to move
wildly around. We decided to try and triangulate it as there were four of us,
but we all seemed to be pointing at each other. I think we were all
assuming it would be coming from a tussock of vegetation. Then I thought it was
coming from under an old railway sleeper, so I bent down to listen closely and
it suddenly sounded like it was metres away in the hedge. Then it dawned on me,
we had been stood right on top if almost from the moment we got
there. It was in the middle of the path, deep down in a crack in the bare ground!
It was only occasional calling, so I had to try and
pinpoint where I thought it was. I had my head torch on by now then suddenly I
caught site of it, about 20 cm down and impossible to get to. It looked like a
large, dark Wood Cricket but it was gone again, out of sight. About an hour of breaking the
sun-baked ground up with nothing but our bare hands and multi-tools filled much
of the fissure up with dry loose earth. We were starting to think we had blown
it by causing a little too much disturbance when I tried turning the torch off.
It sang within seconds and was suddenly right there in the open, only to
scuttle back into a crack that was yet again impossible to reach into.
It was nearly 10.00 pm by this point and I was
starving! I had no idea how much time had gone by. Karen suggested using a
feather to coax it out (something I have done successfully before with
spiders). One attempt and it worked, the cricket popped out and bounced around
frantically for a few seconds before I got him in a pot!
Here it is!
It clearly wasn’t a House Cricket or a Wood
Cricket. Consulting “Grasshoppers of Britain and Western Europe” I thought it
was closest to Svercus palmetorum on looks but the call
was totally wrong. A few days ago when I had shown Peter Sutton
Matt’s recording, his first thought was Eumodicogryllus bordigalensis. But
both of us dismissed this at first as this animal appeared too dark, especially
compared to the photos in the book. I posted images on a Facebook group to see
if any one had experience of Svercus in Europe so I
could rule it out, when Chris Tindal suggested it could indeed be Eumodicogryllus bordigalensis.
Sound recordings on Xeno Canto were a good match. Now this species is heading
north in France, it’s just over the Channel in fact. Also, macropterous animals can
fly, so it is actually rather more likely than not that this animal
got here on its own. Suddenly this has gone to a ‘first for Britain’
scenario, rather than just some escaped pet food (it did seem odd to me
that an escaped cricket would walk for half a mile from the nearest house to
set up home where it did).
There is a Polish paper that suggests macropterous males can remove their wings, but this doesn't seem to be backed up with good evidence. So are there more animals at Waltham? Did it get here under its own steam and this is one of the young from a previous generation or was it introduced accidentally? I believe that we have to work under the assumption that this is the start of a likely natural colonisation. This species has been marching north in Europe rapidly - Peter told me it is already in Scandinavia, so it it seems it was inevitable this species would make it here at some point.
As I wrote most of this last night, I turned on Channel 4 News to see the piece about the fires in Bordeaux - utterly heart breaking. Yes, seeing new animals colonising the UK is interesting to us entomologists, as is the wish to be the first to see or find a new species but it does also make me feel like a disaster capitalist on occasion. This really would be unlikely to be happening without man made climate change. Yet, it's vital that these events and species are catalogued so we can adapt to our ever-changing invertebrate fauna.
Peter Sutton is happy it’s Eumodicogryllus bordigalensis. So it
looks like we have a cricket new to the British Isles (it has not even been recorded on the Channel Islands yet). The common names are numerous: Bordeaux Cricket, Southern Cricket or Verge Cricket, and it’s quite common in
France. I don't really like those first two names, so suggest we use Verge Cricket here (place names are not very helpful). Apparently, they are known to enter cracks in the ground
during the day – just like this one did. I predict there will be more of
these animals on the south coast, in the near future, if not already.
It just goes to show, if you hear or see something a bit
different it is worth putting the hours in. Persistence does pay off in natural
history.
Back to Matt for the final word!
I’m delighted that I was able to pick this cricket up from its unusual call, and that it stuck around long enough for us to pin it down. Huge thanks to Graeme for the time and effort he put into finding and capturing it, and for his detective work on confirming the identification. This is the first time I’ve ever found a species new to Britain! It really does go show to what else could be out there, waiting to be found.
Pan-species Listing is thriving! We've never had more people taking part as we do now, it's a great time to get involved with this worthwhile and intensely enjoyable way to do natural history. We're heading to Global Birdfair for our third year now. This year we have lots going on, so please come and find us. This is what we are up to:
1). We have a stall again, Robin 76. I will be selling (signed if you want it) copies of my book at a discounted rate.
2). Come and ask us (myself, Andy Musgrove, Mike Prince and Mark Colvin) about all things PSL. We will again be pan-species listing the event (and adjacent nature reserve) with the website setup live so you can see our progress. Last year we reached 824 species over the three days, rising to over a 1000 species when we combined the 2024 and 2025 species lists! I would love to beat last year's total, but with other commitments this year and the weather, I am not going to go crazy this time. Well, OK just a little bit. Here's the list from 2025, and the list for 2026.
3). We'll have some moths and other inverts to show you on our stall but we really need YOUR records too from the event. Please do come and find us with any and all records to add to our list - anything and everything. Big lists of moths and other species very welcome.
4). We have one-hour bioblitzes daily, where we typically record c200 species. They're fun and fast! Drink up all the species identified by myself and other experienced naturalists. Come find us on our stall at 10.00 am and 2.00 pm each day (11.00 am on the Sunday though).
5). That's because I am doing a 45 minute talk at the Turnstone stage on Sunday morning at 10.00 am about the book. Head to our stall straight after for books and/or the morning bioblitz.
6). This year I am trying to see 6,000 species through the course of 2026, as of Wed I am on 3,962 species. I am well on target but if anyone can help me get a species or two, I'd be super grateful.
7). I am also only 44 species away from 10,000 in my lifetime! If anyone can get me a lifer I'll be over the moon!
Really looking forward to it, hope to see you there.
I haven't posted a longer update here in a while of my '6000 species in 2026' pan-species year-listing challenge, as I have been doing more daily updates on Instagram/Facebook. I thought an end of June update would be a good thing, the 'half way' stage in the challenge (actually not quite, as there are 184 days between 1st July and 31st December). Anyways, I ended 30th June on 3,840 species for the year (64.0% of the challenge complete). I am about 850 species ahead of where I would be if I were to add 16.4 species a day, every day (exactly the number I would need to reach 6,000 on the nose). Of course, that's already out of date (I am on 3,862 species - 64.4%). On the 30th June I was working at Heyshott Down, doing a plant survey, where I added Marsh Fragrant-orchid and Musk Orchid to the year list (along with Goshawk).
This is a really fun challenge but I certainly won't be doing it every year. Almost everything I am adding at the moment is from work and moth trapping. I am not looking at any specimens until after September. I had planned to go to Scotland in the last week of June but various things conspired against me, but I did have a few days out instead. A day trip to the Cambridgeshire fens with Peter Sutton was great fun. I finally got to see Reed Leopard!
And this aptly named Lister's River Snail! What an absolutely beautiful aquatic snail this is.
Wait, the top of that snail looks familiar? Oh yeah, it's the poop emoji!
And of course, the star of the show - the rather rare Agabus undulatus!
I have seen lots of new stuff already this year, 235 species to be precise! That's 1.30 species per day. I am only 53 species away from the mythical 10,000 species for my PSL life list, something that will likely now happen in late August. Everything in the following collage I have seen new in the first half of 2026.
One of the interesting things about this challenge is how how it has changed my behaviour. Now, we had an epic trip to Cornwall rock-pooling at the end of March/start of April. This was so good, that it has sort of ruined rock-pooling for me in Sussex. You have to work really hard here to find new things, as such I have only been out once since. Meanwhile, two or my largest target taxa are vascular plants (with a 1,050 species target) and moths (with a 850 target). Now beetles are my highest target (I have set myself a ludicrous 1,200 species) and although a lot of these are field identifiable, a huge number are also sitting in alcohol waiting to be identified over the winter. Not so with moths and vascular plants. They're both great groups to add yo your list as the year progresses. As such, I have really got back into these groups, especially moth trapping, dusking and going out at night. I have even really been enjoying gen detting moths. It's also a really great way to do recording when you are already busy! As well as a great way to cool off during a heatwave - go nocturnal! Nothing has been more exciting though than netting an Eastern Bordered Straw at Hurston Warren at the start of that invasion (before my feed was saturated with other people's pictures of them), what a moth!
After 137 days I matched my first incarnation of my pan-species list. That was 2,748 species that once took me 32 years to accumulate. In other words, it took me 137 days to match what once took me 11,795 days! I can't think of any better way to show the power of the pan-species listing approach than this! I should add I have never once used AI to identify anything and never will, you can read more about that in my book!
Anyways, here's where I am at with each taxa. I have reached my targets for protists, other animals, annelids, sea-spiders, crustaceans, springtails, 3-taled bristletails, fish, amphibians, cnidarians and bryophytes. I am getting very close on mammals, molluscs and butterflies.
This chart is interesting, you can see the rapid growth of the list in January that then flattens out in Feb and Mar where I became increasingly desk bound. Then the field season started at the start of April, from this point on I am adding species at a very consistent rate, around 24 species a day!
So I thought I would pull out the ten most speciose taxa and chart them in the same way (the other 28 taxa are displayed as 'others' here in dark blue - the fourth line down). Vascular plants (mid blue) are in the lead for now, but could well be over taken by beetles and/or moths. Beetles (orange) show a vert similar pattern to the vascular plants. Moths have REALLY ramped up in the last six weeks, storming past bugs, spiders and more. Moth trapping can add dozens of species a day (of course, the by-catch is significant too) but my garden actinic is typically one or two new species a night (so I have taken to trapping with my MV at my old place of work, Southerham). The two steep pulses below (the grey line) represent the madness of the two heat waves. Spiders (yellow) started hard but plateaued. This is because most spiders I couldn't field ID are waiting for me to look at over the winter. Bugs (in light blue) are likely to overtake spiders at some point. Flies, birds, hymenopterans, molluscs and bryophytes all cluster together, but with flies just nudging into 6th place (in green).
Will I make it? Sure, I think so. Burn out is something I just don't get, I love it all too much! I would love to get to 6,000 by the end of the year, with specimens further adding to the total as I process them from Jan to Mar next year. Fungi season in the autumn will surely add a few hundred species too. I still haven't seen a Dunlin, Grey Plover, Goldeneye, Goosander or Pink-footed Goose! An autumn trip to Norfolk is on the cards for sure.
If you want to get into pan-species listing, you can sign up to our website for free here www.panspecieslisting.com. And it's well worth getting my book, which has already gone to reprint! https://pelagicpublishing.com/products/pan-species-listing.And please do consider sponsoring me for this challenge, I am raising funds to help Sussex Wildlife Trust manage their land. My Just Giving page is here.
I'll be at Global Birdfair the weekend after next, so come and find me. Will do another post on that in the next few days.
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