Dolbear’s Law

It’s July in Texas, and the crickets are getting started. Some years they are incredibly thick — I recall one year, back in the late 70s, when they had to close the Interstate — crickets so thick and slippery you couldn’t drive safely; drifts of crickets over a foot deep along the roadside. Ah, the distinct aroma of dead crickets in the morning; shopkeepers shoveling piles of crickets from the front of their stores… I’ve always heard you could tell the temperature by the cricket’s chirp — faster in warm weather, slower in cold. Fact is, there’s a well-defined formula to calculate the temperature based on a cricket’s chirp rate, accurate within a degree (if you have a snowy tree cricket). It’s called Dolbear’s Law, and it’s 110 years old.