Will you see many grasshoppers this summer? We hear that pesticides are having a destructive effect on all sorts of harmless or useful insects. From lazy days lying in the long grass, you'll remember the odd clicking noise of the grasshopper and see it leap over you, even. But one minor creature which, this year, seems as lively and enduring and widespread as ever, is the creature which hides behind a blob of foam, known to us - and other peoples - as cuckoo spit. And how many children have poked curiously into this blob and come across the creator of it: the frog hopper.
You find, at the base of the foam, a tiny green yellow creature which protects itself from bird predators while it sucks away at your juicy plant. How effective is it as a cover? Pretty good, you'd think, though somewhere is has been written that there is a particular wasp which fishes the little green thing out and brings it to feed its own larvae. How does such a tiny thing - and no doubt when you were young you wanted to see - produce such a quantity of foam? It apparently can expel air through a valve which is covered with fluid from the anus, thus blowing the emerging fluid into bubbles. It seems, too, that even rain will not dislodge this sticky mess. There is some substance mixed in there in the creation of the foam bath.
This year the creature has made a dead set at a group of herbs in pots. Number one favourite has been the winter savory, small treelets with much new green stems and leaves. Also in the mint. Not much else. The plants can be cleaned, however, by using the small, pint sized, rather litre sized, hand sprays. Water only. The nice little green creature can move at quite a pace when revealed. And, if you believe in the balance of Nature, you simply take him on your finger and bring him to a different part of the garden and let him loose on long grass or something such.
How did it first get the name cuckoo spit, which is not just used in the English language. Seile cuaiche, says the Irish dictionary. Kuckukspeichel in German. Named presumably because it comes more or less with the cuckoo. But when? By whom?