The fact that i categorize Cicadery under the topic "urban planning" amuses only myself.
More pictures and video of cicadas today:
A hideous tree covered in cicadas, and the pile of cicadas under it.
A video of a cicada pulsing to emerge from its shell(handheld video, shaky and huge size).
...and a cute video of an inchworm.
Prime numbers & cicada cycles. Aw yeah.
Prime numbers are very good.
Welcome to the wonderful 17 year itch!
Monday morning I first noticed the Cicadas were out. I took some photos and video of cicadas then and this morning, they are out in full force at our house. It would be nice to get a step-by-step photo shoot of one cicada emerging, so hopefully that will happen this weekend.
They are covering the bushes behind the house. Their holes and little quiet sleeping forms have been in my garden beds for weeks now. Finally we can hear them whirring away. Now the fun begins.
Included in this set are:
A partially squished white cicada (they are white right after they emerge from shell).
A cicada with a messed up wing.
Cicadas having a cicada happy hour on my bluebells.
A basic cicada picture.
Cicadas on my azelea.
A cicada emerging on a wild onion.
A cicada wing.
Cicada holes.
The hairy legs of a cicada shell.
A pile of cicada shells by an oak tree.
An emerged cicada still white with wings.
An emerging cicada peering with red eyes over its shell.
..and more that I didn't note here.
And, of course, various videos. Of exciting things like cicadas crawling. *whoo*.
Enjoy!
My friend Brent said he was searching for mug shots today, and who should appear before his little searching words on Google but this woman in her mug shot best.
I am so proud. And what a picture for google to show me by. *preens*
Brent is a true digital photographer, and as much or more voraciously consuming life with his little munching shutters as I.
I found a wonderful website on grammar and writing that has made me wake up to my sentences. Sponsored by the unknown group Capital Community College Foundation, it is an education in writing well, in a few packed pages. This section on sentence variety thrilled me by offering concrete writing advise, the likes of which I have not seen since elementary school.
I'm not sure if other students in my classes received more guidance than I, but I never received half of the lessons this website offers. Seeing these long, floridly complex sentences given validation has been a highlight of my week (aside from the dead bird and Mother's Day lunch sans utensils). I'm gobbling up technical explanations of then and than and conjunctive adverbs.
It has been raining for days here - the azeleas, heavy with blooms, are bent in arcs nearly to the ground, exposing their dark internal stems. The boxwood line has split open like baking bread.
After my usual return-home walk around the house with the dog, I noticed we had a dead bird on our front walk. Some of you might remember my pet dead Downy Woodpecker from when I lived in Castleton, which lived in my freezer for well nigh three years. I steered the dog in a wide arc around it, and cheerily greeted John when he drove into the drive with a "We have a new pet dead bird!"
We live across the street now from a group home for Alzheimer's patients (the potential hilarity of this has not escaped us). We've been told that slow ambulances are common, and once pressed against our window late at night when EMTs unhurriedly entered and left the home, as red lights washed the houses.
John, of course, paid less mind to the dead bird and noticed the ambulance across the street, humming in idle, shiny red. Is it...? he asked, and I replied, No, I don't think so. They carried in someone, perhaps? Upon consideration, I then thought that perhaps just pink blankets were piled on the stretcher, and someone would indeed be coming out - living or dead, I did not know.
I took my camera out, and snapped a set of pictures of the little bird, water in huge beads on its wing. I took a baggie and picked it up. Birds are always lighter than you expect, barely there. This one was the size of a small sparrow, with a bright orange stripe on its head. I held it up and made John say hello to it. I found the window spot where it smashed, feathers still sticking, and made a movie.
Sometimes birds are only stunned when they hit windows. You must then set them inside a brown paper bag, somewhere cozy, until they awake and peer up at you when you peek in. That is when you can release the live bird. Life was gone from this one, however. A bit cold, tiny pink legs stiff. The ambulance still waiting in the drive while I found a shovel and slid the olive creature into the slice of wet clay. I went inside to download the pictures.
Death sauntered by. And John and I took a long walk down to the creek, and returned to watch the News Hour. The TV deaths were more real.
I got out my books for the identification. Death's meditation set aside, I moved on. At first it seemed a common sparrow of some sort, but soon found myself in the warbler section, inspecting the orange crest of an Orange Crowned Warbler. Birdwatching has been a growing delight for me, as I live in places with varied supply of species. Racing to grab the book, chanting remembered identifying marks to myself, I've been delighted at backyard glimpses of wipporwills and woodpeckers. This time, it should be easy - I had photos.
After several hours of worrying over the lack of black speckles on my Orange Crowned Warbler, I posted on a bird forum. I threatened to exhume the creature if I couldn't solve the mystery, to John's horror. Finally. flipping between my two bird books, I finally realized I was off track with this orange comb - and focused instead on the speckled belly. Paradigm changed, I turned quickly to the Ovenbird.
There it was! My little olive backed orange-headed bird was an ovenbird, with pink legs, stripes on the side of its orange head, and speckled black and white belly. The nests, like little dutch ovens, give Ovenbirds their name. Mostly forest-floor or underscrub dwellers, my little corpse was probably wandering over from nearby Dora Kelly Nature Park when it met its end. I can only hope it wasn't a female, because she would have a nest to keep. They just flew up from winter lodgings. It seems a shame to have one die at the start of the season.
(One of my books mentioned that Ovenbird males sometimes mate with up to 4 females, and that two males can be seen feeding a female's clutch. Sounds like some saucy little polyamorists to me!)
