I went for a short walk around the parkland at Parke yesterday after work in the evening sunshine. The grassland was alive with long-winged coneheads – it has a been a really good year for this bush cricket – they were ‘singing’ everywhere.

Here is a male long-winged conehead

 And here is a recording of their song captured through a bat detector – which enables their very high pitched noises to become audible (recorded earlier in the week in a glade at Hembury Woods).

One of the main predators of coneheads and other grasshoppers – the wasp spider are also common too. You can see a female long-winged cone head in this picture which has been caught in the spider’s web and then wrapped up for consumption later….

Reminds me a bit of the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings or was it Harry Potter?