Clean

Ever since I started this nature photography malarkey, I've struggled with grasshoppers. Specifically, I've driven myself and them mad by trying, and usually failing, to get clean images of them, with all the identification features clear. And also, I've never been confident in telling apart two of the commonest species we have here: the Lesser Marsh Grasshopper (Chorthippus albomarginatus) and Meadow Grasshopper (Pseudochorthippus parallelus). The guy who verifies grasshopper records even wrote to me once, giving me a list of helpful pointers to improve my record keeping, but I couldn't seem to make head or tail of them, so I carried on making more or less random guesses.

And then suddenly, last month, I got it. I don't know why, really, but I looked at a group of photos I'd taken in Tilly's field, and it was perfectly obvious which were Meadow and which were Lesser Marsh, and when I went back to the orthopterist's email, that suddenly made sense too. This afternoon I've checked back through my grasshopper photos from the last few years, and rolled my eyes as I re-tagged and re-named quite a few; if I'm lucky, I might even manage to correct some of them on iRecord before the verifier has to do it.

So, anyway. This is a female Meadow Grasshopper, which I managed to coax onto a grass stem I was holding down at Tilly's field this afternoon. I discovered today that if you offer them a stem, most grasshoppers will leap away - but then, most of them leap anyway, as soon as you look at them - but a few will climb onto it, allowing you to separate them from the grassy mess in which they live, and get some better photos. This one then sat so passively (probably because she realised she was now quite a long way up in the air, and didn't fancy trying to jump down) that I was able to show her off over the gate to one of my neighbours, who was out for a walk with his wife and came over to see what I was up to and have a bit of a chat. By this time it was raining, again, as you can see, so I carefully put the stem back down, watched her spring away into the undergrowth, and took myself back off home for lunch.

The features that identify this specimen as a Meadow Grasshopper are short wings with a bulge on the fore edge, incurved pronotal side-keels, dark hind knees, and (you won't see this one in any books, I don't think) a fat face; and the thing that says she's female is that her abdomen tapers, whereas in a male it's more blunt-ended. Male Meadow Grasshoppers have long wings, also with a costal bulge, but they rarely reach the back knees. Lesser Marsh Grasshoppers are different in a number of ways, and if I can get a decent photo of one to post I'll list them all, but the two most obvious things are that the wings of both sexes are longer, and the face is more angular. I've begun to think of the Meadow Grasshopper as having a donkey head, while the Lesser Marsh is more of a racehorse.