Cicada's Song

"Mostly what I like about cicadas is the wave-like crescendo of their calls."

Last week while taking some laundry down from my outdoor close line, I noticed a cicada on the fence post a few feet away. With a friendly sense of curiosity, I went over for a closer look. Suddenly, the thing flew straight at my face with a loud crackle. Like a ninny I jumped back and gave a little scream of surprised laughter.

Mem'ries!.... All alone in the moooooonlight!....

I have always liked these large bugs, which look so much the dragons in Chinese New Year parades. As kids we were told their noises speed up as the heat intensifies. The theory went that the bugs were trying to cool themselves off, and I think I was charmed by the idea that the trees were filled with thousands of funny-looking bugs with built-in fans.

In reality, male cicadas make those noises with special organs on their abdomens called tymbals in order to attract the attention of females. The noise, which some people refer to as cicada song, is one of the loudest made by insects. Female cicadas cannot “sing” since they do not have tymbals, although apparently the females of some species in our area can make clicking or snapping sounds with their wings.

On a hot day is does seem like you hear more cicadas. Perhaps it is just that their numbers grow as the summer wears on, and so the hottest days are the days when we have the most cicadas buzzing around us. Or, maybe the heat just makes male cicadas more interested in mating.

Almost ready to rock, a ghostly member of a previous brood waits for its cue

Either way, it is tough to get a good view of them, since they stay mostly either underground or in the tops of mature trees. As nymphs they tunnel around feeding on tree roots. Once they mature, they emerge from the ground, climb up nearby tree trunks, shed their old skins and fly off. After mating, adult female cicadas eventually lay eggs inside slits made along small branches. The eggs hatch and the new nymphs fall to the ground and begin the cycle all over again.
The cicadas out there this year are the annual cicadas. Unlike those “magic” 17-year cicadas which appeared in our area in 2004, the annual cicadas stay mostly up in the trees far out of sight. Despite their moniker, individuals actually can live up to five years, but broods overlap so there are always adults with us each year.

In late summer, my kids and I often find the discarded tan shells of cicadas all around the yard. We stick them on our shirts and wearing them for the rest of the afternoon like fine brooches. We all seem to admire the way that the empty legs can still clutch at the fabric of a t-shirt and take great delight in alarming friends and neighbors who don’t like bugs so much. (Perhaps one of us is destined to be a bona-fide entomologist one day. Or maybe the director of a horror movie. Or perhaps just a designer of dramatic jewelry. I’m not sure which.)

And may I say mam'selle ...... c'est tu!

Mostly what I like about cicadas is the wave-like crescendo of their calls. I will never forget the first time I stepped outside with my newborn son in my hands-- it was July and the cicadas were sizzling all around in the trees near the hospital. It seemed to me the most soothing noise a baby could hear at that moment, like a soft, humid embrace from nature. I remember tilting my face towards the sun and closing my eyes, happy to leave the flat, antiseptic air of labor and delivery behind us and get on with becoming a family.
Cicada noise can also seem like a soundtrack for a mental movie where the trees sound like frying bacon and visions of the coming school year dance around in the white cloud puffs overhead.

It is often the noise one remembers hearing just before a the cooling crash of a summer thunderstorm. Perhaps as you read this, that cooling crash has already occurred. I hope so, because we need the rain desperately.
Back in January I wrote of a desire for snow and cold and on the day the paper got printed we got three inches of the white stuff. So maybe those powerful Voice printing presses will do their stuff once again. Here’s hoping your reading this in front of a window pane covered in raindrops, near some trees full of cicadas.

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