Where Do Crickets Go In The Winter?

"Where do crickets go in winter" sounds like one question with one answer, but it's actually two questions about two unrelated animals that happen to share a common name. One is the loud, chirping field cricket that fills a New Hampshire yard every September and then genuinely dies at frost. The other is a quiet, humpbacked jumper that lives in damp basements and crawlspaces and was never part of that outdoor cycle at all.

Which answer applies to you depends entirely on whether you're remembering a sound from last fall or looking at something moving across your basement floor right now.

For the classic outdoor chirper, the popular assumption is essentially correct. Iowa State Extension is direct about it: "field crickets spend the winter as eggs laid in the soil," and "cricket problems end in the fall when the adults are killed by heavy frost or freeze." There is no adult field cricket anywhere outdoors sheltering through a New Hampshire winter — the entire population exists as eggs about 0.8 inches deep in firm, damp soil, arrested in diapause until warm weather triggers a spring hatch.

This is one of the rare, honestly unremarkable verdicts in this hub: winter really does end the field cricket problem, completely, until next year.

The cricket-shaped insect actually found indoors in a New Hampshire winter is usually not a field cricket at all — it's the greenhouse camel cricket, an invasive species that has quietly become the dominant camel cricket in homes across the eastern United States. Epps, Menninger, LaSala and Dunn's 2014 citizen-science survey, published in PeerJ, found it reported by more than 90 percent of participating households and "far more common than native, North American camel crickets... in and near homes east of the Mississippi."

This species lives in damp, dark basements, crawlspaces, and garages year-round, and NC State Extension is clear that large numbers signal a moisture problem, not a cold-driven migration indoors. It doesn't chirp, it doesn't diapause, and it doesn't care what month it is — which is exactly why spraying it in January and expecting the problem to be seasonal simply doesn't work.

The word doesn't fit either half of this story. The field cricket doesn't hibernate — the adult dies outright at frost, and the only thing that survives is an egg in programmed diapause, a developmental pause rather than a dormant adult riding out the cold. And the camel cricket in your basement isn't dormant at all; there's no seasonal state to interrupt, because a stable damp basement never signals "winter" to begin with.

Getting this wrong costs a homeowner the actual fix: assuming the basement population will "die off like the ones outside" delays the dehumidifier and sealing work that's the only thing that reliably reduces camel crickets, while the population keeps going undisturbed through the very months the myth says it should be shrinking.