Welcome
Last week I mentioned that the 17-year cicadas were coming.
Over on the right you'll see a photo of a tree limb I took in my backyard earlier this morning. The 17-year cicadas are here and I'm loving every minute of it.
I noticed them for the first time coming out of church last Sunday. A sound. A thrumming background noise that is now nonstop. If any of you remember the movie War of the Worlds from the '50s, the cicadas sound like the ray guns used by the Martians but far off in the distance. Last night I slept with the windows open. Around 3 AM I awoke thinking my tinnitus had gone berserk. "What is that sound?" I wondered as I lay there half-asleep. I had to get up and convince myself that it was the cicadas and not my ears that were creating the noise.
Since Sunday the cicadas have become much more noticeable. The sidewalk coming into work is coated with crushed cicada bodies. (Who's stepping on these things? They're big and probably gooey on the inside. You'd have to wipe your feet after an encounter.) The black locust trees in my neighborhood have multitudes of them on their branches. The maple in my back yard is a veritable cicada seraglio.
I've got a red maple and a dogwood in my front yard that I planted when we first moved in. They're small and fragile. I don't know that the trees will tolerate a lot of abuse. So I've got to "bag" those trees to keep the bugs from damaging the new branches. It'll look weird for a month but then the cicadas will be gone for another 17 years.
K-
I gotta wonder why you would be loving them. Wouldn't they be harmful to the flora in the area? Another blogging friend has been fuming about the infestion of tent caterpillars in her area -- they are eating everything!
I'm loving them because it's such an unusual sight. The cicadas aren't here to eat, they're here to mate. They do some damage to trees because the female lays the eggs by cutting a slit in the end of the tree branches. That tends to kill the foliage downstream of the cut but for large trees does no permanent damage. Smaller trees or trees under stress (like those owned by me) can die if enough cicadas lay eggs in the branches. But there's no eating of foliage going on like with tent caterpillars.
K-
Haven't gotten this far south yet, but I'm waiting. I've been hoping they'd fly off with the soccer ball at a game.