Do You Hear What I Hear?

In addition to tornadoes and wild and dangerous lightening storms we have also been blessed this year with swarms of Locust. Makes you wonder.

Technically these little buggers aren't locust, but are often called that around here. They are in fact Cicadas, and these seem to be from the '13 year' family. I'm not sure how 'they' figure these things out. Do 'they' band the eggs? Do 'they' wait around to see how long it takes them to hatch? Evidently someone goes to the trouble of keeping track of this.

This particular hatch is very, very loud and could easily drive a person stark raving mad, if you weakened. Thankfully most of them do shut up at night. This variety is a bit smaller than the 'normal' cicada that hatches, and has a more orange cast to them. From what I read it takes about a month of this incessant noise for them to complete their life cycle.

I see allot of holes in the yard (from the larvae) and gobs of these brown husks left around.


So how about the rest of you? Have the '13 Year Cicadas' hatched out your way?

And really, you know this vine is just doing what the rest of us wanted to do....