Yesterday evening, right before the weather turned nasty, as I stood on the deck over my garden I suddenly caught a sound wave, one that I immediately recognized but had never before heard around my house. I ran to grab my recorder and was able to capture a snippet of the call. Seeing me pointing my microphone towards his house, a neighbor approached me warily, inquiring if I am trying to find the property line. I explained what I was doing and he left, satisfied in his knowledge that I am just feeble minded, and not trying to sue him for his land.
The call was that of the Jumping Bush Cricket (Orocharis saltator), a species I first encountered a couple of years ago in Cambridge, MA. Since then I have been looking for other places where this pretty animal might live, but never expected to find it in my backyard. It is a species that belongs to the chiefly tropical subfamily Eneopterinae, and makes a fine addition to the chorus of crickets around my house, which now includes 12 species:
Jumping Bush Cricket (Orocharis saltator)
Handsome trig (Phyllopalpus pulchellus)
Say’s trig (Anaxipha exigua)
Carolina ground cricket (Eunemobius carolinus)
Allard’s ground cricket (Allonemobius allardi)
Striped ground cricket (Allonemobius fasciatus)
Two-spotted tree cricket (Neoxabea bipunctata)
Snowy tree cricket (Oecanthus fultoni)
Spring field cricket (Gryllus veletis)
Fall field cricket (Gryllus pennsylvanicus)
House cricket (Acheta domesticus) (introduced)
Eastern ant cricket (Myrmecophilus pergandei)
The Smaller Majority 
Hi! Thank you for your post! I was frantic just now because I thought I found a dead roach on my back porch! I searched and the brown-banded roach looked VERY similar to what I had found but the legs seemed a bit bigger. But I was scared, nonetheless. I kept searching and came up with the jumping bush cricket but all the maps I found showed that their territory didn’t reach up to Chicagoland. Back to the phone with my exterminator. Then I came upon this post and the picture on your site. Dinfinitly, we HAVE these little insects in the suburbs of Chicago! I will listen for the live ones, this evening!
There are many of these on the trees in my yard, here near St. Louis MO. The sound of their chirps is pleasantly bright and cheery, described by one author as “piping”, and rather in contrast to the somber monotone of Oecanthus latipennis, also abundant.