More Cicadas

I posted about seeing cicadas around here a couple weeks ago when walking to our local Memorial Day parade. This past weekend they have come out in full force near our house and the noise is deafening during the day! When Dianne came in the house a couple days ago, she said she couldn't hear the beep sound signaling the locking of her car doors.

The cicadas are covering the trees and flying around all over the place looking for a partner and laying eggs. The photo to the right shows them in the shade of a tree outside our place. Here is another shot near our neighbor's door.

If you don't have cicadas in your area and you're not familiar with them, you can read more about cicadas here. I found this page with some recordings of cicada sounds. It's hard to appreciate what a chorus of hundreds of them sound like. I think Dianne pegged it when she said it sounds like the Martian noise in the original War of The Worlds film. I found this segment from the film on YouTube. Listen to the sound about 2:30 in to the clip. I'm sure that was their inspiration.

I tried taking some macros of the critters. They are about an inch long, so it's hard to get all of them in focus in an interesting way. The shot below was the best of my close-ups. This one was taking a break from climbing up the tree trunk and just hanging out in the sun.