There's a funny little tale about an old Ozarkian gentleman who is sitting on a park bench one summer night listening to the crickets. An elderly lady joins him on the bench, smiles and begins to listen to the choir rehearsing in the nearby church. That's how I thought they did it too . . . On a bright September morning as Susanne and I drove to one of her research sites, she told me more about the musicians whose tunes jam the airways on sultry summer nights. They call by scraping the fixed ridge on the edge of their forewing against the file on the underside of the other wing.
Grasshoppers have several ways of producing sound.
The most common way is by scraping the teethlike structures on their hind legs against a vein on their outer wing covers. These sounds usually are not loud enough to be picked up by the human ear. Some grasshoppers produce sound when they fly, and this noise, familiar to all of us, is reminiscent of playing cards hitting the spokes of a bicycle wheel. The clicks are made by pumping blood into the wings during flight and then popping them closed. I like what writer and naturalist Sue Hubbell has to say about them in her book, Broadsides From the Other Orders.