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.

Cicadas Are Back

When Dianne and I were walking to the Blue Ash Memorial Day parade, Dianne noticed several cicadas and their exoskeletons on trees near the Hunt Road House. There wasn't any noise, so they must have recently emerged from the ground and started their climb up the tree. The first photo below shows one that had just shed the exoskeleton and was moving its wings in the sunshine. The second shot shows one trying to emerge. Actually, it was hard to tell if it was stuck or dead, but it was interesting to see how the back splits and they come out. If you want to brush up on your cicada anatomy, I found this site pretty interesting.