During the 2013 summer heat wave, I released a thousand African field crickets into my neighborhood in Oxford, UK. We'd suffered dismal weather for too long, and their loud chirping made us imagine we were in some tropical paradise. I wrote a letter to 'The Independent' newspaper extolling the idea, and there followed a national and international media storm. Introducing foreign species is highly illegal, and I was subsequently interviewed by the police. In this book I collect together all 114 of the letters to the editor I have had published in local and national newspapers in the UK and abroad, and tell the fascinating stories - some light-hearted, some more serious -, associated with them, including 'The Plague of a Thousand Crickets'.