No cicada sound as I place my shoes on the stone wall by the beach where the green dory awaits, one end resting on the sand, the other in the water, rising and falling with each wave coming ashore. I’m heading out for a morning row, to greet the sunrise from the middle of the lake, to jumpstart the day with rigorous exercise, and to recalibrate my rhythm and perspective. It is then, that I notice a solitary cicada, songless, sitting, no, standing, I suppose, beside my shoes on the limestone block topping a sea wall.
No mating music — sibilant, shrill (and apparently super sexy!) — emits from this solo specimen. No cicada sounds at all this morning, in fact, unless it’s the sound of silence.
The cicada, so silent, so solitary, is subtle against the gray limestone of the lakeside seawall. (Yes, I see the humor in that, a lakeside seawall, and also in the silent sound of a cicada. Is it even a cicada at all if it isn’t singing?!)
Male cicadas have loud buzzing songs that are produced by special organs called “tymbals,” located on the first segment of the abdomen… A male’s song attracts females and may also serve to attract other males, especially in those species that form noisy mating aggregations. (Source: Songs of Insects)
Perhaps this solitary cicada is a female then. Or a male not yet ready for female company or an aggravation of noisy males.
Then I remember that this is the Cicadoidea Ultra Emergence.
An inescapable screeching sound coming from nearly every nearby tree and local forest. Winged insects clinging to unsuspecting people—or colliding with them, as the big bugs haphazardly fly around.
If these scenarios trigger a memory, you may live in a region of the United States that is home to periodical cicadas. The sudden appearance of millions of screaming, red-eyed insects is not something that is easily forgotten. (Source: The Nature Conservancy)
This summer’s super emergence — an *historic* emergence — of periodical cicadas birthed more buzz than political pundits pontificating.
2024 marked the first time since 1803 that two cicada broods—the 17-year Brood XIII, concentrated in northern Illinois, and the 13-year Brood XIX found in southern Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas and throughout the Southeast—emerged together. (Source: The Nature Conservancy)
Fortunately, we are east and northeast of the bumper broods. And for an instant, I consider the possibility that this solitary cicada, overwhelmed with the frenzied Cicadapalooza in the Midwest, escaped to the Adirondack Coast for some me-time. A little well-deserved R&R and a taste of the lakeside lifestyle…
Wise bug!
What do you think?