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Yes, More Cicadas
Robert Evans Snodgrass’s Insects: Their Ways and Means of Living, first published in 1930 and then republished by Dover, has an excellent chapter on the periodical cicadas with some fine illustrations. Turns out the abdomen of the adult is mostly hollow. The newly emergent adult cicada has to harden off and darken over a few…
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Cicada Chorus
The communal roar of the cicada chorus, a dynamo seventeen years in the making, and the individual buzzing and rustle of the periodical cicadas at Princeton Battlefield State Park. The thicket of understory and woods pictured, bordering a trail and a meadow, was the loudest, most active spot here on Thursday. The cicadas were flying,…
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Brood X
There are actually three species of periodical cicadas that make up Brood X. Magicicada septendecim or Pharaoh Cicada; Magicicada cassinii or Dwarf Periodical Cicada; and Magicicada septendecula or Decula Periodical Cicada. We call these seventeen year cicadas (there are also some thirteen year ones), but these are median spans: Decula can live from ten to…
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Brooding
New York, except possibly for parts of Long Island, are not in the range of Brood X Magicicada genus periodical cicadas. We had to travel to Princeton, NJ, practically their northeastern-most outpost, to see them. And hear them: a thrumming incantation, background for much of our time in the town. In the thick of it,…
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Corvid, Spelled Right
“How many dawns, chill form his rippling rest/The raven’s wings shall dip and pivot him,/Shedding black rings of tumult, building high/ Over the chained bay waters Liberty–” Hart Crane, with a little substation of a raven for his seagull. Work has been going on atop the tower through most of the breeding season, but this…
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Backyard and Beyond 