Sulphur-winged Grasshopper

Here's a Sulphur-winged Grasshopper I met last spring. Or at least that's the ID I got from iNaturalist (and it seems to be a reasonable ID). I got a pretty good picture of this individual, and although I'd have liked to have gotten different angles, grasshoppers are rarely cooperative and are very good at flying off when I try and maneuver around them.

Sulphur-winged Grasshoppers are, unfortunately, more than a little variable in appearance. Admittedly they don't look like puppies or woodpeckers, but their coloring isn't especially uniform. I do see some faint banding on the rear leg femur, and there is a yellow ring around the rear leg tibia. The head might look a little boxier than some other grasshoppers, but I'm not sure you can see the pronotum (a saddle-like shield just behind the head) well enough to help with the identification.

If I had a picture of the grasshopper with its wings open, and if we saw a sulphur-colored band on those wings, this identification would be on firmer ground. Unlike butterflies though, you almost never see grasshoppers displaying their wings while at rest. And getting an in-focus picture of 1 in motion is problematic for a number of reasons.

It looks a little like a relative of the Sulphur-winged Grasshopper, the Autumn Yellow-winged Grasshopper, but based on the name I doubt that June would be the best time of year to be seeing those guys. I'm not sure if there are other band-winged grasshoppers that resemble these 2 that also live in New Jersey.

June 15, 2023 at Sourland Mountain Preserve
Photo 300992947, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)


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