The Backwoods Resurgence: Natural History of Grouse-Locusts

Thursday, December 8, 2022

Natural History of Grouse-Locusts

Crested Grouse-Locust (Nomotettix cristatus) from Hidden Valley WMA, Virginia, U.S.

Talk about camouflage! This is a Crested Grouse-Locust (Nomotettix cristatus), hiding in plain sight on highland sandstone. Grouse-locusts are fingernail-sized grasshoppers who hide in barren patches between mosses and lichens in rocky, upland clearings. Grouse-locusts (Family Tetrigidae) are also called pygmy grasshoppers. The name stems from the Latin stem "tetricus" meaning "harsh." While most typical grasshoppers prefer grasslands, grouse-locusts thrive in much more barren, rocky environments. Often, they can thrive on rock outcrops much too small and nutrient-poor to support relatives.

Obscure Pygmy Grasshopper (Tetrix arenosa), Warrior's Path State Park, Tennessee, U.S.

Most species are either completely flightless or have very limited flight abilities. Most are pebble-shaped, and some appear quite unusual like the Obscure Pygmy Grasshopper (Tetrix arenosa). While flight is not one of their strongest abilities, grouse-locusts are able to hop, climb, and swim very well. These are important skills to escape the terrestrial insectivores who hunt them.

Black-sided Pygmy Grasshopper (Tettigidea lateralis), East Tennessee State University, Tennessee U.S.

Some species even thrive in woodlands, feeding on vegetation under the deciduous canopy. The Black-sided Pygmy Grasshopper (Tettigidea lateralis) is common in oak-beech forests and supplies a lot of biomass to insectivorous vertebrates, including birds like ruffed grouse, but also reptiles, amphibians, and mammals.

Brunner's Grouse-Locust (Tetrix brunnerii). Kissick Alkaline Fen, Wisconsin, U.S.

Other species are specialized to colder habitats, such as temperate deserts and glacial eskers, like the Brunner's Grouse-Locust. The harshness of sun and a lack of water in the desert, and cold winter climates with few sources of adequate food throughout the boreal forest, can be perfect places for grouse-locusts to outcompete other Orthoptera. Be sure to keep an eye out for them in the right habitats.

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Quotes

"Humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn - we must look to our teachers among other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They've been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out." - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013

"Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do." - Wendell Berry, for The Dying of the Trees, 1997

"People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know once again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by the singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about our economic status or our running day calendar. Wildness puts us in our place." - Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder, 2002

"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." -Crowfoot, 1890 dying speech to the Blackfoot Nation after the wholesale slaughter of buffalo by the Canadian government.

"Civilization is not, as they often assume, the enslavement of a stable and constant earth. It is a state of mutual and interdependent cooperation between human animals, other animals, plants, and soils, which may be disrupted at any movement by the failure of any of them." - Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 1949

"The human world is so bleak, simple-minded and tragic compared to that of the living biosphere. Learning about the rest of life on Earth is like having the blinds pulled up on a window that you previously just thought faced a bleak brick wall, only to look out the window and see mountains, forests, beaches and a verdant landscape stretching for miles." - Joey Santore, Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't, 2o20

"We were all meant to be naturalists, each in his degree, and it is inexcusable to live in a world so full of the marvels of plant and animal life and to care for none of these things." - Charlotte Mason, Out-of-Door Life for the Children, 1904

"Instead of mountain men we are cursed with a plague of diggers, drillers, borers, grubbers; of asphalt-spreaders, dam-builders, overgrazers, clear-cutters, and strip-miners whose object seems to be to make our mountains match our men -- making molehills out of mountains for a race of rodents -- for the rat race.

Oh well, revenge is on the way. We see it in those high thin clouds far on the northern sky. We feel it in those rumbles of discontent deep in the cupboards of the earth: tectonic crockery trembling on the continental shelves. We hear it down the slipface of the dunes, a blue wind moaning out of nowhere. We smell it on the air: the smell of danger. Death before dishonor? That's right. What else? Liberty or death? Naturally." -Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968

"There is a way of living which is liberating, which does not make us feel trapped and isolated. We could call it "the wilderness mind". It doesn’t matter whether one lives in the city or in the country, whether one works in a factory or a university. The secret to this "wilderness mind" is keeping the power of wonder of the universe alive. If we keep this sense of awe, we will remain young forever. If we lose it, we wither inside." - Enviroscapes, 1995