In Vermont and New Hampshire, most grasslands are pastures and meadows – ephemeral plant communities that depend on people to survive. Without mowers or livestock, they would slowly choke. If I didn’t mow our meadow in October, the following spring it would crowded with perennials – goldenrods, milkweed, asters, fleabane, cinquefoil, and clover. These would eventually giving way to sun-loving shrubs – blackberry, raspberry, and black raspberry – whose seeds are dispersed by birds. Next would come gray birch, cherry, pin cherry, aspen, and white pine. Finally, in turn, would come shade-tolerant trees like sugar maple, beech, and hemlock.
As I follow the mower around the house, I see immigrants from the immense interior of the continent that have been brought by settlement to the East’s manmade, Lilliputian prairies. Black-eyed Susan and blue-eyed grass, both prairie wildflowers, spread eastward as the forests of Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York fell before the long-handled ax. Although Vermont’s meadows and pastures are just a remnant of that nineteenth-century agrarian age, when 75 percent of Vermont’s forests were cleared for grazing, the gate to the vast Midwest prairie is still ajar.
My lawn may be small by grassland standards, but it does support a legion of grasshoppers, particularly Carolina locusts, that explode from the grass like popcorn from a hot skillet as I push the mower forward. When I pause, the busy yet carefree world of grasshoppers comes alive. As they eat, they slice through the grass with sharp, sliding mandibles that move from side to side, the left always overlapping the right. They waste as much as they eat.
By early autumn, my mowing does more than just displace hungry Carolina locusts; I also disrupt their mating ritual. Two or three feet above the lawn, the males hover on broad black wings edged with yellow along the rear. Their vibrating wings make a slow buzzing sound that attracts females and other males who compete for the attention of females. Whenever a female grasshopper lands, three or four males move toward her. If I get too close, they snap into the air, and then reassemble wherever the female lands.
Close cousins to the grasshoppers, crickets are also an unequivocal sign of the season. By October, a few field crickets inevitably move from the meadow into our living room whenever a cold front rolls in from the north. They scurry along the walls, hidden by furniture, traveling from one throw rug to another. From dusk to dawn, territorial males send out salvos of triple chirps or continuous, high-pitched trills to attract free-ranging female crickets to their corner of the house. Going to bed is like going camping as we drop off to sleep lulled by indoor cricket serenades.
Occasionally a cricket crosses open floor, slipping into full view. When my son Casey, now 15, was a toddler, he would spot one, drop to all fours, and trail it with short-lived but acute determination. Usually, the cricket got away or Casey’s attention waned, but once in a while he would grab it and beam. Because I wanted to encourage his interest in the small forces of nature, those seemingly prosaic beings that most of us long ago ceased to consider, I would tell him about crickets.
I would tell him that crickets are among the oldest insects, that their ancestors fiddled to the dinosaurs, and that their music is mechanical, not vocal. The base of each wing has a file and a scraper, and a vibrating membrane, the tympanum. The file of each wing rubs against the scraper of the other wing, setting both tympana in motion, filling the house with prairie music. I would conclude by telling him that crickets hear not through their ears but through the tibia in their front legs.
When a cricket sang from a remote corner of the kitchen, Casey would crawl for it, the yardstick clutched in his fingers, clapping the floor. If I reached his quarry first, I would gently pick it up and let its song pour through my fingers – a metronome that keeps cadence with the changing season. Then I would place the cricket on Casey’s knee. I believed it was important for him to touch living things, to touch the wildness of his backyard. If his overeager fingers crushed the insect, so be it. A crushed field cricket is the price to pay for broadening a little boy’s landscape.