Shush, crickets chirping,
gentle rain and a soft breeze
don't close the window
Cricket Course and Ecological Alarm in Southeast Arkansas
By K. Brad Barfield
At 3PM, the shadows start to return. Trees stretch again across roads and fences, and the land finally begins to cool—just slightly. But this hour reveals something quieter and more unsettling than any biological silence. It reveals absence. Not the absence of song, but the absence of place.
The edge habitat is disappearing.
In the past, Ashley County’s cricket populations thrived in what scientists call ecotones—those transitional areas between two types of land cover. Fence lines. Ditchbanks. Fallen logs. Weedy edges along plowed fields or along gravel roads. These were not wasted spaces—they were nurseries of sound, home to crickets, katydids, frogs, snakes, spiders, and more.
Today, many of those edges have vanished beneath two forces: mechanical mowing and chemical herbicide.
County right-of-ways are now kept so clean you could almost bounce a basketball along the ditch. Fence rows are scorched with glyphosate and 2,4-D. Even private landowners, pressed for time or aesthetics, often “clean up” with broad-spectrum treatments that leave the margins sterile.
To the human eye, this looks like maintenance. But to a cricket—it’s the apocalypse.
What disappears with those weeds and vines isn’t just cover. It’s:
• Moisture retention, critical for egg-laying and nymph survival.
• Refuge from predators during the hottest parts of the day.
• A gradient of microclimates, where different species find their niches.
• A corridor, where sound and scent carry, letting populations stay connected across distance.
Without these spaces, even native crickets face collapse. Not dramatically—but gradually, like a song that gets softer each summer until it disappears entirely.
In 3PM’s long shadow, the question becomes: how do we reclaim the margins?
It may not take much. Let a fencerow go wild. Spare a ditch from one round of herbicide. Mow less, and later. Restore a margin—not as waste, but as living edge. And maybe, by this time next year, the sound returns with the shade.
Sources:
This essay is based on land management studies and edge habitat research conducted in southeastern Arkansas, supplemented by field notes from The Ashley County System: An Integrated Environmental Assessment and historical vegetation records in The Living Dirt of the Delta, both found in the Ovid T. Switzer, Jr. Collection (on loan). Unless otherwise noted, essay written and compiled by K. Brad Barfield.
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