I walk down to the lake as day is giving way to evening, in the gloaming.
The air as I pass is full of chirruping. No, that’s not accurate. The chirruping stops as I pass, as if my feet press buttons creating pools of silence as I walk. For a long time, I thought the chirruping came from some type of frog, a loud and consistent call as summer days turn to evenings and on to darkness. I confess to once digging in the garden by torchlight looking for the source of the sound, hoping to unearth a frog. I found nothing.
Later someone told me the sound was sandgropers, not frogs. They’re funny creatures, sandgropers. The Western Australian Museum factsheet I look up describes them as ‘very strange, wholly subterranean insects’. A whole life lived underground, deep in the sand. The fact sheet goes on to tell me they are descended from grasshoppers and, due to their underground living, are rarely seen despite being prevalent. They are common in the sandy soils around Perth, but are not restricted to WA. They inhabit sandy soils across the Australian mainland, except the south-east corner. We Western Australians are called Sandgropers – a person from WA, like me, is colloquially called a Sandgroper. Funny, to be named for an insect virtually no one ever sees that lives all its life underground, silently. Yes, sandgropers are silent (the insect kind that is, not Western Australian people). The chirruping my footfalls are stopping is not made by sandgropers. It is from another weird underground insect – mole crickets. I email an entomologist and he confirms this to be true. The chirruping is definitely mole crickets.
Unlike sandgropers, mole crickets are loud and are quite often seen. I have found them clambering across the kitchen floor on a summer evening, looking like marooned lobsters with large, thick front legs and long antenna. But mole crickets were rarely heard or seen in Perth up until the 1990s. They have since become well established in gardens and grasslands here. Again, I turn to a WA Museum fact sheet and this time learn that mole crickets are true crickets and make their sound by stridulation, the running of the ‘teeth’ on one leg against a ridge on the other. The males call from the mouths of their burrows, which are ‘specially shaped to amplify their songs’. And amplify they do. The sound rings out across the park as I walk towards the lake. I wonder if the chirruping stops because they feel my foot falls vibrating through the ground or if they hear me coming. I imagine my steps creating three-dimensional, concentric ripples of disturbance through the ground as I walk by, and the mole crickets pausing until the ripples subside.
As the sun drops deep in the western sky and disappears below the trees and houses, I nestle into my spot under the Moreton Bay fig to sit by the lake, in the gloaming. The sky is pale blue, reflected darker in the still water. Not a breath of wind stirs the air. It smells fetid, musty after the day’s heat. A pair of grey teal swims across the lake’s mirror surface, ripples corrugating the reflections of the paperbarks.
As I sit by the lake, the mole crickets’ callings dominate the air waves. The hum of distant traffic carries the base note. I have to listen through the wall of sound they make to hear other things. The swans calling to each other. The little grassbirds – tee, tee, too-wee. A kookaburra’s laugh cuts through. Something lands loudly in the tree above me. It’s getting darker, but I make out the form of a red wattlebird. Something else flits quickly across the sky. Perhaps a microbat. A squawk across the water in the reeds draws my attention – it’s my night herons, or two of them, lifting out of the lakeside reeds and flying. I lose them against the trees, find them again as they gain height, lose them again in the darkening reeds when they land.
I can see insects in the air near me, blurred glimpses as they fly through my field of vision. Mosquitoes find my ankles and bite, despite my thick wool socks. I swat. They bite anyway. They are relentless. I want to stay here in this darkening world, watching the reflection of the sky in the water. Somehow the reflection is holding more colour than the sky itself. I don’t understand the physics of that. I could look it up, but don’t. I’m happy to sit with the observation that it is so, without knowing what causes it to be. Not everything needs explanation.
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Jill