Cricket (Gryllidae)

Terrestrial, hatching August–October, active in water between 55 and 75°F, and imitated at #10–14. Recorded from the Wisconsin driftless, where 364 Wisconsin rivers on this site carry a page.

Black, blocky and heavy, with long back legs, the cricket is the late-season terrestrial — it gets onto the water by accident from grassy banks when the grass has gone dry and the hatches are finished. August, September and October are the peak, the active band is 55 to 75 degrees across cold, cold-transitional, cool and warm water, and imitations run size 10 to 14. What matters is how the natural behaves once it lands: it hits hard, sinks low, and then does very little. A cricket fished tight to the bank, in the shade, with an audible landing is imitating exactly what happens, and a fly that arrives delicately is imitating something else. A Black Cricket in 10 to 14 is the direct pattern, with a Foam Beetle in 12 to 18 or a Black Foam Ant in 14 to 20 for the smaller accidents that come off the same banks at the same time of year.

#10–14Hook size
55–75°FWater, active
Aug–OctPeak months
1Life stage fished

Subbasins with trout water where it is on record: 7 of Wisconsin's 43.

See Wisconsin's trout water on the live map → Every reach coloured by water temperature — the water these hatches come off.

What it is

Terrestrial · Gryllidae · adult

Black, blocky, and heavy, with long back legs. It gets onto the water by accident from grassy banks, late in the season when the grass is dry and the hatches are finished.

The late-season terrestrial, after the hoppers thin out. Black, and fished in the shade.

When it hatches

Peak is August–October. The pale months either side are the shoulder — the app widens a peak by one month in each direction and recommends the bug there, and no further: that widening is bounded so that a bug peaking in May is never offered in August.

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peak shoulder not recommended

Water conditions

The band is a water temperature, not an air temperature, and it is the range in which this insect is worth fishing — for a mayfly that is the emergence window; for a scud or a midge it is simply the range trout will still eat one in.

55°F 75°F

Active from 55°F to 75°F. On this map that is cold, cold-transitional, cool, warm water — the band crosses 3 of the three breaks the river colours use. Breaks at 58, 64 and 70°F.

Stages

What the insect is doing, and what that means for what you tie on.

Stage	What it is
adult	Lands hard, sinks low, and does not move much. A cricket fished tight to the bank with an audible landing is imitating exactly what happens.

Matching flies

3 patterns in this book imitate the Cricket, across its stages. Which one to tie on follows the stage the water temperature says it is in — the app makes that call on a live reading; this page lists the whole set.

Where to find it right now

The rivers with a page here that sit in this insect's regions, with a USGS gauge reporting water temperature. This list is re-ranked against the reading each gauge is sending now and today's date, so it is live — the fallback below it, if the readings do not arrive, is each river's measured July mean.

Regional presence

Regions, not collection records. This insect is recorded from the coarse regions below; nobody has surveyed which named river it has been caught on, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

northern lower Michigan MI
southern lower Michigan MI
the Wisconsin driftless WI
the Virginia mountains VA
the North Carolina mountains NC
southeast Minnesota MN

Rivers in these regions with a page here

Related hatches

Same family, or overlapping this one's calendar on the same water.

Open the trout map →Every trout stream near you, coloured by today's water temperature.