������

An “all-around natural historian who’s best known for bird stuff” is how Ted Floyd, an instructor in DU’s��, describes himself.��

This fall, Floyd—the longtime editor of��, author of eight bird books, and frequent speaker at events worldwide—added a different kind of feather to his cap when he recorded the first known detection in Colorado of an invasive cricket from Asia.

Floyd has taught bird migration classes for the�� for about 10 years and also has a background in entomology, the study of insects. So, he was the right person in the right place when he first heard the not-so-familiar chirps of the Japanese burrowing cricket just off Asbury Ave. one night in late September while walking on DU’s campus.��

The DU Newsroom recently caught up with Floyd to learn more about the discovery, the science behind it, and why surprises like this keep him exploring.

How did you become interested in birds?��

When I was a kid, my mother compelled my siblings and me keep journals. Some kids have to make their beds or take out the garbage—I did that, too, but I also had to keep a journal, and I just stuck with it. At first, I wrote about boring stuff, like how many times I brushed my teeth. But pretty soon I started noticing stuff around me—the plants in the garden, the clouds in the sky, and the birds I heard singing. That’s what set the stage for me.

How did your birding background help you notice the sounds of the Japanese burrowing cricket?����

I've been what they call an “ear birder”—someone who identifies birds by their calls and songs—for a long time. Listening to and recognizing��birdsong is perhaps the oldest form of natural history, but listening to crickets and other insects is actually quite new. Since they sing at night and they’re small and dark, it was virtually impossible to identify them until 20 or 25 years ago, when we got the technology to record the sounds and generate a spectrogram, a visual representation of a spectrum of sound over time. As a result, many species have been discovered in only the past decade or so. I used to use a��designated recording device, but nowadays, a cell phone works great.

What exactly did you hear that night that made you pause?��

Some cricket sounds are very familiar here, but what I heard that night was a low-pitched sound, faster and harsher than other cricket songs. It’s like people who can identify a pop song after hearing a couple notes—I just knew it was different. I had a hunch about what it was because they're pretty common on the East Coast. So, I took my phone out, made a recording, went back home, and got it confirmed.

How were you able to confirm it?

There’s a citizen science platform called��, where you can upload images and��sounds, and a community of experts helps with identification. But I don’t always trust the internet, so I also reached out to Daniel Parker, who��is a deaf-blind natural sounds expert in the Washington, D.C., area. He’s amazing—he uses technology to make recordings and input stimuli that his brain hears, rather than his ears. He’s able to pick up fine-level detail that crickets can hear but the rest of us can’t. A secondary confirmation came from Brandon Woo, who’s an entomology PhD student at Texas A&M University and��perhaps the world’s foremost expert on identifying grasshoppers.

How did this cricket get here?

It’s not a North American species—as you might gather, it’s indigenous to Japan and other parts of East Asia. It’s actually fairly entrenched in lore over there and appears in folktales and literature. It came to the U.S. by accident around 1960, perhaps by container ship at the Port of Baltimore, and had been hanging out on the East Coast for decades. Recently, its population has been spreading like crazy, but once the crickets hit the Great Plains, they got stuck at Kansas because the habitat farther west is fairly inhospitable for them. What Brandon (Woo) surmised—and I agree—is that they came here on trucks going to home and garden stores. They flourish in potting soil, so probably someone dropped off a huge tub of potting soil full of crickets at a Target or Walmart, and the rest is history. Since my discovery at the end of September, there have been recordings elsewhere in Colorado—in Fort Collins, Louisville, and Lafayette. ����

It appears this species is harmless. How do you determine that?

You always have to be careful about declaring something harmless or harmful. Sometimes insects prove to be not nearly as bad as expected, like the Japanese beetle. And sometimes things are much worse than expected, like the pythons in the Everglades. But all the evidence from the East Coast shows this cricket doesn’t interact much with other crickets and isn’t disrupting nutrient flow. They don’t seem to have a taste for agricultural crops or ornamental trees and shrubs. They’re garbage lovers; they love potted plants, trash dumps, and compost heaps. They seem to hang out under plants, not up on the plants—minding their own business, singing down in the cedar chips and the mulch. So that's kind of cool, right?

Why is documenting these kinds of discoveries important?����
Documentation on platforms like iNaturalist gets information quickly into the hands of specialists. Think of “iNat” as a first responder for natural history—a place for experts to come in and see the latest happenings and corroborate information. But, more importantly, knowing what’s out there in the world has consequences for human well-being. Whoever documented the first COVID cases was definitely on to something. But even if the Japanese burrowing cricket plays no significant role in the environment, I think it’s just intrinsically worthwhile to know about the world around us. That’s part of being human.��

What does this discovery mean to you?

Discoveries like this��are what keep me going after all these decades—just the potential to discover something new. It's never a routine; it’s never the same old, same old. Just yesterday, I came across a chestnut-sided warbler at Boulder High School. It was at the baseball field, in a tree by the right-field fence. It’s a rare bird to see in Colorado anytime, but it’s almost unheard of in November. I posted it online, and now there are a bunch of birders there, investigating. Turns out the tree is infested with little aphids, and the birders have seen several other rare birds there—a Northern Parula, an orange-crowned warbler,��and an Audubon’s warbler. The birds have found this magic bug tree, and it’s just so cool that people can share their images of it, and everyone can see why all these rare birds are in a tree by a ballfield at a high school. Every time I go out, I don’t know what I’m going to see, but I’m sure there will be something new and interesting and different.��