You want crickets? My daughter has a bearded dragon that, for a time, we bought boxes of live crickets via mail order. Something like a thousand at a time. They came in medium-sized boxes with a dense air screen, and I’d collect them from the postal guy and set them somewhere I couldn’t hear the rustling and cheeping.
One shipment, Mrs. B. felt sorry for them and went to put them in a cricketarium we’d used for smaller batches.
We had crickets cheeping in every corner of the house for two freakin’ weeks. Guinea fowl were not an option. Nuking from orbit was seriously considered.
In Richard Brautigan’s novel A Confederate General from Big Sur, they have a problem with noisy frogs that start croaking when the sun goes down. So they visit a pet shop and acquire two small, pet alligators.
At dusk, Lee Mellon took the first alligator out of the box. “You like frog legs?” he asked, and carefully put the alligator in the pond. The alligator lay there stationary like a toy boat. Lee Mellon gave him a push and the alligator sailed out into the pond.
There was instant silence over the pond as if the pond had been dropped right into the heart of a cemetery. Lee Mellon took the second alligator out of the box.
Lee Mellon stroked the back of the alligator and put it down into the pond and floated it away, and the silence in the pond was multiplied by two. Silence hung like mist over the pond.
“Well, that takes care of the frogs,” whispered Elaine.
“They’re gone,” said Lee Mellon.
“Yeah,” I said. “There’s nothing in there now but alligators.”
Rumor has it grackles eat crickets. Here in Austin we have grackles and the largest freetail bat colony in the world and we still have cricket plagues.
A few years ago, they were enlarging the UT football stadium. They were working at night when it’s cooler and had some pretty powerful lights set up to work by. The result that the Thursday before the Saturday night game, the stadium was chock full of crickets. some bright soul decided the thing to do would be to power-wash the seating. Which resulted in mounds of dead crickets piled up in the corners. These baked and cooled and baked and cooled until game time. The stench was unbearable and many of us left before half-time. And this was when we didn’t suck.
