Cicadas (again)

[altivo]

OK, I've now seen one, and heard many, but not here. It happened while I was in Park Ridge to go to the dentist yesterday. She asked if we had any around and I said no, and she said they were all over in Park Ridge.

Sure enough, on my way back out to highway 72, when I stopped at a traffic light, one landed on my windshield. They are not very good at flying, probably because they are so large and heavy. So I opened my windows to listen, and the sound was there, particularly in the parks and forest preserves as I passed through. It's quite different from the annual cicadas that we do have every year. Instead of a high pitched buzzing whine, to me it sounds like the rustle of dead leaves in the wind, but amplified a thousandfold. It's a chatter rather than a buzz, and it rises and falls in waves.

As soon as I listened for a few seconds, I realized that I have indeed heard that sound before. Presumably that was either here in Illinois, but 17 years ago, or farther back when I lived in Michigan. Michigan has two different cycles of the cicada, so there are more possible years when I might have heard it. In any case, I did not know on the previous occasion what it was, or that it came around so rarely.

Frankly, I like it. It's rather pleasant, in a natural sort of way, and I even have an association with warm summer and outdoors that must go back to that prior occasion. It is also much preferable to the sound of human babies squalling, dogs barking, dirt bikes snarling, or coworkers shouting shrilly to one another over a distance of 30 feet, all of which I seem to have to put up with daily...

Comments

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

There are also annual cicadas every year, as well as 13-year cicadas. So, there's no telling which cicadas you saw before if it was a long time ago.

As a natural sound, I guess it is not that bad... but they do wreck trees.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

According to the experts, they only damage very young trees. Mature trees stand up to the egg-laying fairly well.

As I said in the post, the sound of our annual cicadas is quite different. I'd not mistake one for the other. The annuals come out later, when the weather is really, really hot, and to me they actually have pitch. There's a whiny, buzzing sound to it that rises and falls. These periodic insects are more like a percussion section, without pitch and just a clatter.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

Whoops, I completely misread that paragraph. Bad kitty.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

No problem. Just don't deliver a hairball on me. :)

Michigan has two 17 year groups and a 13 year group, I believe. So I could have heard any of those in the past. Now that I think on it carefully, it's quite possible that I heard the previous cycle of the 17 year Magicicada sp. here in Illinois, though. That would have been 1990, and that was one of two years in which a friend and I did the ham radio field day exercise in the Chicago forest preserves. Both years were hot and dry, and the date of the event (last weekend of June) is within the right parameters.

The distribution of these critters is spotty. The neighborhood our house was in back then should have been a candidate, since most of the homes were built in the late 19th century and much of the ground had been undisturbed since then. A railroad right of way was just a block west of us, and had prairie remnants growing on it. A very old cemetery was just a couple of blocks east of us, and another was about three blocks north. Yet in 1990 I know we watched for and never spotted any cicadas near our house save for one dead one.

Yesterday I noted the sound and flying insects in Iroquois Woods, which is on the edge of Park Ridge. I tried to detect them in Busse Woods, about 10 miles farther west and a much larger expanse of preserved woodland and river bottom, but caught not a hint of them.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Oh they are nice when there's not a heap of them, but hear they can get loud enough to drown out the traffic....and they never stop just a constant beeezing!!