From KUT:
A lot of people love crickets. They think they’re cute, like Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio. Some people keep crickets as pets, and others eat them. But Gonzalez has a cricket problem. The bugs seemed drawn to her workplace.
“Today when we were in one of our treatment rooms, and we just kept hearing this cricket,” she said. “We crawled all through the room trying to figure out where it was, and it turned out, we think it was in the light fixture.”
She says her office has “cricket patrol” in the mornings, when they sweep up cricket carcasses, but it’s not just her office. For Gonzales, the cricket situation seems to be getting worse everywhere every year.
“Are they going to take over the city? I feel like I’m a little bit in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds,’” she said. “I guess you could find out if we could make money off of all of these crickets.”
Mission accepted.
The first step is to verify the problem, and the best answer may come from folks who deal with crickets and other pests on a daily basis.
So, do pest control experts in Austin think there are an unusual amount of crickets this year?
Keld Ewart of Bug Master says no. “This is kind of standard,” he said.
“So far, I haven’t really thought that or heard a lot of feedback on that,” replied Rob Wheeler with Aztec Organic Pest Service.
Longhorn Pest Control’s Bronson Boyd says no.
“I’d say even a little bit less than normal,” Boyd said.
So could Gonzales just be wrong? Derrick Miller of Dyrrick Pest Control says maybe.
“She moved to a place and they having them a lot,” He said, “maybe they just catching her attention more. Sort of like when you buy a car. Once you buy a car you start seeing a lot more cars like yours.”
