The Roar of the Night In 1899, Dr. Robert Thaxter Edes, a Harvard graduate and Civil War veteran, noted that "the tree cricket does not say much in the daytime." Dr. Edes was trying to calibrate the change in the pitch of a tree cricket's note as the temperature changes. He offered a graph but not the actual pitches. F. H. Hall, writing in 1912, was more specific. The song is "a clear mellow whistle resembling the words treat, treat, treat, pitched about in C, two octaves above middle C, on a warm evening rising to D." One species sings a half pitch higher and another "about F# on an average summer evening." The ensemble of those songs is what I hear these late summer nights. It is uproarious, a universal stridulation, as Dr. Edes might put it. Unlike the first insect songs of summer, which come from the pasture grasses, the chorus of the tree crickets rises all around me, from bushes and from high in the maples and hickories. It sounds as though they are letting their songs fall from space. It is, of course, not a true song, but the rasping together of wings held straight up from the body. For all I know, they could be playing tiny panpipes. The darkness seems to exult with song, and I find myself fearing the day when the sun will go down upon silence. This choir sounds like the end of a season, and yet it sounds like the start of one, too. It fills the night like a marsh full of spring peepers, whose ringing peep is said to be at E and F, four octaves above middle C. Nature may not intend this symmetry, but I can't help liking it, the way we're piped into April and piped out again in September. It's encouraging to think that all this night song now will result in tree-cricket eggs that wait through the winter before hatching - the source of next summer's singing. Encouraging, too, to know that only undisturbed tree crickets sing. All is well as long as the night keeps roaring.