Blaring Whiners—Part 1

We are entering the heart of summer—those hot and humid days when the sweat flows freely and frequently, and noisy insects dominate the acoustical environment. All night long the crickets and katydids chirp away—providing a constant droning chorus of sound by rubbing various body parts (wings and legs) together. Their songs are trills, squawks, buzzes, and sometimes even pleasant bell-like tones.

The daytime sound field, however, is dominated by cicadas—incredibly loud noisemakers who are biologically unrelated to crickets and katydids. Their sound-producing mechanism is also dissimilar: located on the bellies of male cicadas are tymbals (even the name tymbal sounds garish), which are drum-like organs that vibrate by the contraction of his tummy muscles. The sound is amplified by resonators and membranes built into his gut, to produce a penetrating noise that would be envied by any heavy-metal guitar player who loves the shrillness of electronic distortion.

When I was a kid I would hear this piercing whine on hot summer days. It was so loud that I’d stop playing and look around, wondering what in the world that could be. An older kid told me that it was coming from the hot wires strung between telephone poles. I believed that tale for many years.

Three years after we moved out here to the country, we had an invasion of periodical cicadas. In our neck of the woods this incursion is expressed by the Linnaeus periodical cicada—often popularly and improperly dubbed 17-year locusts, because countless hordes emerge every 17 years and fill the air with their drone for a few weeks. About two inches long and sporting bulging bright red eyes, the periodical cicadas are a rather grotesque sight, and the woods echo with their hum. A few days after the invasion began, our dogs caught on to the fact that these bugs were a tasty source of protein and we’d laugh to see them dash across the yard and leap into the air to catch and consume one.

An amazing fact about these periodic cicadas is that in their nymph stage they remain buried underground, sucking on tree roots for 17 years. Then they all emerge within a week of each other. How do they count up all those years so accurately? Aren’t there a few who miscalculate and emerge at 16 or 18 years? Can you imagine their confusion, if they did? “Where is everybody?” It’s just another of nature’s wonders.