The hunter became the hunted!

There is a lovely sound in my kitchen at the moment and I don't know if I should silence it.

The sound is of the chirrup of crickets who live behind the radiator and it's evocative of long outdoor dinners during Summer holidays in the South of France.

It's a bit of a talking point when people are over for dinner. Most visitors think it's a bird until we explain, and then we generally have a short discussion about how pleasant the sound is, how it reminds them of Summer holidays etc. My Father likes the sound so much that he was wondering whether he could take a few of the crickets over to his house and let them live in his radiator.

The crickets weren't put there on purpose but now that they're there I'm reluctant to get rid of them. Some evenings I come down to the kitchen and the noise is very loud and a bit scary. They love the heat and the dark and as the temperature rises they chirrup loudly in chorus. Some of them hop out and hop around the kitchen for a bit. They've got huge recently and they can hop for a few feet.

They came to be there because my son is obsessed with bugs. I bought him the best book I could find on bugs. It's called "Buzz" and has loads of gorey, graphic information on yucky, creepy bugs. On the front are buttons that make different bugs noises (including the sound of crickets chirruping) when you press them. It's such a great book that I bought a few copies as party presents for his friends.

Inside the book were suggestions for bug pets. One of the top ten pets is a praying mantis - it's a stick like carnivorous insect that holds its two spindly legs in front of it as if it is praying.

My son decided that he really, really wanted one. He talked about it for some time but obviously it was just talk. As luck would have it he went off to the pet exhibition to the RDS with his Dad and found a guy who sold bug eyed praying mantis insects in glass cases for €25. He said "it was like a dream come true."

The praying mantis isn't a bad pet. You don't have to walk it, clean out its cage or worry about going on holiday. The only problem from my point of view was that the praying mantis had to be fed live crickets.

You can buy live crickets from pet shops. They are quite small and don't make any noise. They come in a plastic takeaway carton and are really hard to get out of the carton alive and transfer into the mantis cage because they hop around a bit.

The praying mantis lived for about six months. During that time it shed its skin, ate lots of crickets, went into school for "show and tell" and eventually lost a leg.

After it's leg fell off it wasn't too good at hunting so it died a few weeks later. The crickets left in its cage started to eat the mantis after it died which was really gross. But I suppose it's a way to teach kids about nature.

Meanwhile a few of the lucky and more enterprising crickets escaped while being transferred as mantis food and have taken up residence in the kitchen.

And I'm not sure whether to leave them there.....