a birth in the dog days of summer . . .
Yesterday afternoon -- two different “finds.” I didn’t figure out until a little later just how closely they were related!
First I saw this and thought it was, OH, I don’t know what, maybe a giant June bug, I just knew I’d never seen anything like it. It was attached to the underside of a leaf of the Bird of Paradise.
Then Pete came out and sat on the blue swing. I soon went over to join him and he said, “don’t sit down, there’s a big bug there.” I looked closer and could see it was a Cicada. It was moving its legs, but that was all. I thought it was dying.
It did crawl up on my hand, but then I put it back on the arm of the swing and we came inside.
I started looking at the pictures I took and could see the “big brown bug” was just a shell and that it was covered with grains of sand, so I figured it had come up out of the ground. More and more it all started to make sense and when I looked in my bug book then I knew for sure. What I had first seen was the external shell of the Cicada and then about six feet away I saw the actual Cicada after it had emerged. I don’t know how long this process of emergence takes, but this species of Florida Cicadas take several years to develop underground.
I sure wish I had seen it all happen. Maybe another time….
Cicada poetry
"A thing that cried upon a tree top,
Sucking the shrill wind, to wail it back in a long whistling note --
Now shrill as a flute, now soft as a mandolin, sometimes a piercing cry,
Choked at its very uttering, sometimes a cold tune,
Dwindled into silence, then suddenly flowing again,
A single note, wandering in strange keys,
An air fraught with undertones of hidden harmony.
Ou-yang Hsui
First I saw this and thought it was, OH, I don’t know what, maybe a giant June bug, I just knew I’d never seen anything like it. It was attached to the underside of a leaf of the Bird of Paradise.
Then Pete came out and sat on the blue swing. I soon went over to join him and he said, “don’t sit down, there’s a big bug there.” I looked closer and could see it was a Cicada. It was moving its legs, but that was all. I thought it was dying.
It did crawl up on my hand, but then I put it back on the arm of the swing and we came inside.
I started looking at the pictures I took and could see the “big brown bug” was just a shell and that it was covered with grains of sand, so I figured it had come up out of the ground. More and more it all started to make sense and when I looked in my bug book then I knew for sure. What I had first seen was the external shell of the Cicada and then about six feet away I saw the actual Cicada after it had emerged. I don’t know how long this process of emergence takes, but this species of Florida Cicadas take several years to develop underground.
I sure wish I had seen it all happen. Maybe another time….
Cicada poetry
"A thing that cried upon a tree top,
Sucking the shrill wind, to wail it back in a long whistling note --
Now shrill as a flute, now soft as a mandolin, sometimes a piercing cry,
Choked at its very uttering, sometimes a cold tune,
Dwindled into silence, then suddenly flowing again,
A single note, wandering in strange keys,
An air fraught with undertones of hidden harmony.
Ou-yang Hsui