Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Phenology for 5/22/12: Cicadas

At the Cat Sanctuary clover and daisies are still blooming profusely, one privet hedge has passed its peak and the other is just approaching its peak, and red Rosa rugosa are blooming beside the road.

Up-and-down temperatures have thinned out the moth population. Unfortunately, palmetto "bugs" are trying to move into moths' ecological niche around lights. Let's just say that it takes a palmetto bug every few years to make some of us appreciate how much nicer moths are. (They're not, technically, bugs at all. They're large, flying members of the cockroach family. If you've never seen one, you're lucky.)

But the real nature news this week has been the periodical cicadas. Although Gate City gets a few stragglers from eastern Virginia's famous Brood X, our own cicada population really peaks on a different cycle; this is our big cicada year.

Apart from timing there's no obvious difference between our cicadas and those in Brood X, but there is an amusing bit of local folklore. Christian immigrants to our part of the world, not knowing what cicadas were, thought they might be the locusts mentioned as a plague in the Bible. The proof of this theory was said to be that some call "Egypt, Egypt," and some call "Pharaoh, Pharaoh." In fact the insects produce sound by stridulation, scratching their sides with their legs, and the whirring sound of an individual cicada does sound a bit like "EeerrrRRRrroh." When the trees are full of cicadas using this noise to call one another, it's easy to convince yourself that you're hearing words like "Egypt" and "Pharaoh" in the general clamor.

According to a cicada watchers' web site, our cicadas might be part of what they call Brood I, although their map shows Brood I appearing further east:

http://www.magicicada.org/about/brood_pages/broodI.php

Cicadas are mostly harmless; they bore into only the ends of twigs and seldom do more than minor, temporary, cosmetic damage to a tree. They can't sting, and can't do much damage to large animals by biting or scratching, although if molested they will try. Once you realize how short their lives are and how little fun they have, it's hard to begrudge them any of it.

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