"Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noonday fire,-- / Wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire."

[larryhammer]

Late June, and after a week of scorchers we've ambiguously moderated to merely very hot but muggy: thunderstorms are flirting with actually, yanno, raining on us, which means we get the heavy air but none of the benefits of storms.

The bugs don't seem to mind, though.

    In the row of oaks
outside an office building,
    cicadas announce
a matinee performance
of the great zerEEEEEE Chorus.

It is startling to realize I'm now working in that building, though it describes just about anyplace in the city.

So it goes.

---L.

Subject quote from "The Marshes of Glynn," Sidney Lanier.

Comments

[sovay]

a matinee performance
of the great zerEEEEEE Chorus.

Yikes.

I gather it's a cicada year where you are? I think the last time I was around a swarm was in 2004, visiting D.C. for a conference; it was weirdly science-fictional.

[larryhammer]

Our local species (Diceroprocta semicincta) is pretty constant, year-to-year -- it's a three-year species, with roughly equal numbers each cohort.

Get a few of them in a couple trees, they are very loud. Especially when you get in the middle of them. zerREEEEEE

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

Lovely. The cicadas singing that is, not the mugginess.

I've never heard a cicada. We only have one species in the UK and it hasn't been recorded since the 1990s...

[larryhammer]

The call of one of our local species can be heard here, complete with the starting zeeREEEE and ending ticks. It's rather softer than the real thing, though, and just a single cicada is ... uncommon.

Do they think the species is gone, or are you waiting for the next cycle year?

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow. I can imagine the effect when the whole landscape is zeeREEEing with cicadas.

New Forest cicadas have an 8-year cycle, so they've been missing for some time. But there's hope that they might still survive in isolated areas of the forest...

[larryhammer]

Here's a slightly muted version with just two. And a little ways down on this post is a recording of a related species (it's from a little higher in altitude) not calling all at once.

Alas on the missing for some time.

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

Oh, my goodness! A sound like tiny cymbals!