Welcome back, cicada
Here’s the scoop on the little buggers.
I remember them well from my youth, circa 1962. In the well-arbored suburbs of New York and New Jersey, they sang in the trees and then carpeted the ground like fallen leaves in autumn, making an ominous crunching sound as one walked, the whole extravaganza a sort of cicadesque supernova explosion that signified their own demise and the launching of the next generation into subterranean abodes where they would hang out for the next seventeen years.
Adult periodical cicadas live only for a few weeks””by mid-July, all have disappeared. Their short adult life has one purpose: reproduction. The males “sing” a species-specific mating song; like other cicadas, they produce loud sounds using their tymbals. Singing males of a single Magicicada species form aggregations (choruses) that are sexually attractive to females. Males in these choruses alternate bouts of singing with short flights from tree to tree in search of receptive females. Most matings occur in “chorus” trees.
Receptive females respond to the calls of conspecific males with timed wing-flicks, which attract the males for mating. The sounds of a “chorus”””a group of males””can be deafening and reach 100 dB. In addition to their “calling” or “congregating” song, males produce a distinctive courtship song when approaching an individual female.
Fortunately, New England doesn’t have too much of that particular plague, except for parts of southern and western Connecticut. This year’s invasion is of the very large Brood II (see also this).
And here, if you’re feeling like participating in the fun, is a video. It’s not Brood II, but it’s a similar brood of 17-year lovelies from Illinois:
A Terminix ad came up with the video and, what do you know, there is a Terminix pest blog that talks about cicadas 😉
The year that I was in Korea, the cicadas were everywhere, and noisy! I remember being in formation, out in back of the AFKN HQ building at Yongsan Garrision, and they were in every tree, shrilling louder and louder – especially when the Army Top tried to address us all in his parade-ground voice.
I remember as a kid, filling a jar with these little buggers and stuffing a fire cracker in with them and closing the lid. Pow! Cicada pate.
Bwahahahahahh…haha..ha..ha, er…
Well, It was pretty cool at the time.
Well they bother us alot cause they got us on the spot, welcome back.
Fish love them. The can’t be all bad.
As you noted Neo, never experienced these guys in NE/NH
( though I did run into them on vacation once in Pa)
If they are in any way akin to *tomato horn worms*
I have one word, Yikes!!!!
Homer: Ummmmmmm, Cidada’s!
Make sure your cicadas are fresh!
I’m cooking the popular “Sunday Dinner Beef Roast.” Now, I’ve used, often, (Notice how I place the adverb after the verb. Shows I’m a lady of quality.) fresh parsley, rosemary and thyme, and I can’t taste any difference.
Am I deficient? I’m pretty much a dog when I eat in that I eat to get as much food as fast as possible down the gullet. That’s my enjoyment, what’s yours?
Although I love cats, I’m not a mincer. Smell either excites savage thrusts of the neck while the food goads down, creates a violent thrust away response, or . . . meh, in which case the food is thrust in a plastic sack and put inside the refrigerator for several months.
Sac-o-cicadas.
Neo, thank you for a touch of normalcy today – the coming weeks could prove exciting.
Yes, as a child in southern Ohio were would play with these noisy buggers. Beautiful wings, if caught early while they’re climbing their tree. Summer, after the school year was over, would always start with their song – about 10am when everything was warming up. By 4pm, in the hot afternoon, their chorus would rage throughout the woods and pastures. Creation is amazing!
I remember those cicadas, I think also in 1962 or thereabouts, in Maryland. The insistent humming on the hot summer afternoons — the shining living bugs with their spooky glowing eyes and then the crunchy amber shells they left behind, clinging empty-eyed and tenacious to the treebark as though they were certain they were still alive. We don’t have them where I live now in Cold Country, but I remember how their song filled and evoked the heat and boredom and sheer aimless pleasure of a long long summer afternoon with nowhere to go and back-to-school an unimaginable stretch of dreamy days away, humming from the trees Summer, Summer, Summer, Summer . . .
@
Mrs Whatsit Says:
June 9th, 2013 at 9:51 pm
————————–
Memories may be beautiful and yet
What’s too painful to remember
We simply choose to forget
Yes, Summer stretching out before us. The gravel road down the hill and the County Bookmobile coming soon. Afternoons walking back to the ‘cow pond’ to fish for bluegill or catfish, throw rocks and just goof around – after chores were done, of course. Different times.
I just thought about *global climate change*
seems like the cicadas should be making advances into NE
beyond just western Connetticut if all that malarkey from Al
Gore is true, we ll have to be monitoring that.
Will they be covering *all of Connetticut * by 2030???
Every time Japanese animes air about Summer, it’s those freakishly loud bugs in the background.
MollyNH, global climate change is a perfectly meaningless phrase, don’t you think?
Oh God, the noise…. THE NOISE!!!
I already suffered through Brood X’s infestation, and one from another brood. Every sunset, when the sound would get so loud it would drown out traffic, I would say to people, some of them random strangers “Now THAT is the sound of insanity.” Most agreed.
Yeeech, cicadas…. brrrrrr (*shudders*)
If you’re living in the same area as you did in the early 1960s, you can delete the “circa” from “circa 1962”. That’s 51 years ago, 51 = 3 x 17, and they come back every 17 years, so it’s been exactly 51 years since the third-to-last brood before this one appeared.
yes steve *global climate change*
audacity of the premise is just *stunning* !