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Team cricket - how we found a cricket new to the British Isles
Posted by Graeme Lyons , Tuesday, 28 July 2026 18:45
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.
Nice work! I agree Vereg Cricket is the best name, might not be 'southern' for long based on the way many things have spread!