They are still screaming!

The 17-year cicadas, that is. Yesterday I asked if anyone knew how long they were going to be here, and be so vocal, and someone said they had heard 6 weeks. It’s going to seem really quiet when they leave.

The other day I tried to brush one off a new tree I recently planted. It (and all its buddies also on the trunk of the tree) was chewing a little line in the bark (to deposit eggs I heard somewhere), and I wanted them to leave my fragile little tree alone. When I touched it, it screamed at me in a loud, buzzing, electrical sort of way, like No, you leave me alone! It was a startling noise, scared me. I’m leaving them alone.

 

…Or kind of fuschia. But they don’t stay this way long (or at least in my garden they don’t) so I thought I’d share these while I can, in real time. And for a special occasion… Happy 23rd Birthday to our oldest, A, who’s on a study abroad tour of Europe right now, and has […]

The 17-year Cicadas are in Town

This is a life-size photo of one.

At first I wasn’t sure what it was I was hearing, or stepping on and sweeping up. What had Terminix done at our last treatment, I wondered, that so many of these  were dying and laying belly up all over around the outside of our house? First the stink bugs and now these, even bigger and noisier?

Then I began to hear other people talking about them, and I knew it wasn’t just our house, our woods.

Our area of Central Virginia is full of these things, big 1-1/2″  long and very plump flying bugs. Go outside and you hear the shrill scream of them loud and constant (except when it rains? and for a spell at night? You eventually become numb to the noise and forget they’re out there), almost like a motorcylce gang must be coming down the road–a distinctly different sound than the buzz of the cicadas other years. The woods just rings with them all up in the trees. It reminds me of the sound of peeper frogs that start making their droning noise every night on the lake where I grew up. I’ve heard the same noise on other lakes and ponds as well. Only this is a much louder, more intense sound, and it comes from high up in the trees. The interesting thing about them, as my son remarked the other night, is that they always sound like they’re “over there,” somewhere in the distance in one direction that you can sort of point to, and not right where you are, despite the fact that they’re all over and we’re surrounded by them.

Their bodies are everywhere: on our porch, driveway, deck,…

…floating in the pool, in the skimmers.  Their winged bodies, that is…

Their molted bodies, the empty shells of the pre-wing “nymphs,” those are stuck to the underside of leaves on the trees, as you can see if you look look closely at this picture I took of a small dogwood in our yard. This one little dogwood had dozens of molten skeleton-bodies stuck to the underside of leaves.

Thankfully, they don’t sting or stink. (Yet? With so many dead and dying cicadas, will it start to stink?) They just make a lot of noise and then they lay there on their backs wiggling, getting slower and slower, and then dying. And if you don’t watch where you’re walking, they crunch.

At first, when I noticed them a week ago, I heard people talking about 17-year locusts (Locusts like in Little House on the Prairie, I wondered, eating everything in their path?!), but then I did a little research on them and found out that they are actually cicadas, and what the difference between them is. If interested, look here– http://archive.audubonmagazine.org/truenature/truenature0005.html.  

Very interesting creatures!

Even Butterflies Do It

I haven’t had much that I want to share with the world lately. A lot going on and very busy, but more the kind of thing you write in a journal. Today, however, I saw something I thought was pretty interesting, and beautiful. In our yard, two butterflies mating. Something I’d never seen before, or never quite like this. What do you know?

I won’t get too graphic, but let’s just say they were at it for a long time, and willingly posed for me as I tried various angles to get the best light. Well, maybe they weren’t really so willing and it was more that they were stuck in that position, because they did startle a few times and ruffle their wings in a panicked way, or as if they hoped to scare me off. But they’d calm right down again and be peaceful, no matter how close I got. It didn’t seem like they could just disengage with what they were doing—it seemed a necessarily lengthy process that they either couldn’t or wouldn’t interrupt. They were very connected. It was as if great secrets, delicate treasures, were being carefully passed between them, and they did not dare to disturb the transportation of them. Or it was as if they were saying, Good things take time, stupid human! We go slow and enjoy the process (yeah, really slow). We make a good thing last. OK, maybe so, but it did not look passionate.

As I watched, I wondered which was the male and which the female. If butterflies were like birds, I guessed the more colorful one would be the male, the yellow one. I looked closer, and sure enough, the yellow one, as you can see, was doing the probing, was inside the black one (rather deeply, the end of its body entirely inserted into the end of the other one’s body). I thought, OK, now I need to go in the house and check online to see if that’s right (t had to be, didn’t it?). And what kind of butterfly was this? The name for it was on the tip of my tongue… The yellow one at least. I wouldn’t have pretended to know the name of the black one, or to know they were related. And all of a sudden my mind was full of other butterfly questions—is this the way it is for all butterflies, the male and female different colors? If so, is the orange-and-black Monarch a male or a female, or are all Monarchs orange-and-black?…

[Yes, as it turns out, the yellow one’s  male and the dark one female—they are Eastern Swallowtails. Seems the female can be dark or yellow, but the males are always yellow. No, Monarchs do not differ in color between male and female; both are orange-and-black and look so similar I can’t tell the difference between pictures of the two.]

Butterflies have always fascinated me. When we were kids we liked to catch the yellow-black-and-white striped caterpillars that make shiny jade-green chrysalises edged in gold and then turn into orange-and-black Monarch butterflies (how do they change to such different colors?). We’d find them up on my Uncle Wally’s hill across the road from our lake, crawling on and munching on the milkweed growing in the meadow of the Hill, or we’d find one of those beautiful jeweled chrysalises hanging from the log fence rails. Wed catch the caterpillars or carefully pull of a strip of bark from the log rail and take either the caterpillar or the chrysalis home and put them in a jar with a lid with holes poked in it.

If it was a chrysalis, we just waited for it to hatch.

If it was a caterpillar, we put a supply of milkweed in there with it and a stick to climb so that when it was ready, it would have a way to climb up and attach to something to make its chrysalis. We’d keep check on it, watching to see the amazing transformation from caterpillar to chrysalis, the way it mummified itself and seemed to liquefy then, turning different colors, from stripes of yellow, black and white to green and then  as the day passed, we’ see it begin to darken and realize the chrysalis was a clear shell—because we’d see black and orange and know from previous years that it was the black and orange of a scrunched up Monarch butterfly in there. And soon it would hatch.

The hatching was incredible, too. This shaky little black-bodied butterfly came out, all long skinny elbows and knees (or whatever you call those angular limb parts) as butterfly legs are. The wing were rumpled up, wrinkled, folded, but as the butterly flapped them, they unfolded. We had to be careful to take the butterfly out of the jar and give it room for its expanding wings, so they wouldn’t hit anything and be damaged, fragile things (yes, we were to blame for some deformed butterfly wings and had learned this the hard way). We’d give the butterfly some sugar water in the lid of a jar and he’d (she’d?) unfurl his long, skinny black spiral tongue, like a long perfectly curled hair or a tendril, and stick the end of it in the sugar water and drink. My mom it needed the sugar water to pump up the viens in its wings and we believed her since the wings grew, unfolded, straightened out—much the way an inflatable water raft does when you take it out of the box and blow it up.

It would slowly flap and flap those wings, pumping them up, airing them, drying them out, making them lightweight and rigid and strong, and then… and then if you could be as patient as that butterfly, you would get to see it take its first flight. And we’d clap and say, “Yay!” and be so delighted to see the simple perfection of it. And we were somehow, foolishly, proud to have been a part of it. I felt like a parent–I’d watched after and protected this creature, fed it, and was now seeing it off into the world. But the truth of it was, I’d done nothing, I knew. Well, nothing to damage it, that is. Nature had done the rest. Perfectly.