This reminds me of when I saw the total solar eclipse in Kansas City back in 2017 (despite the clouds). The birds and cicadas hushed when it got dark when it went into totality and then they started screaming when the sun came back out.
I survived a major onslaught of 17-year cicadas a while back. They have more than one song; one of them is the "UFO propulsion" noise heard in films and TV shows of the 50s and 60s. I observed that they seemed to prefer going on foot to flying, but they weren't very good at it. If they rolled over on their back they had real trouble rolling upright.
We do get cicadas on the west coast! I live in the Coachella Valley in Southern California and we get Citrus Cicadas. Their life span is only 3-4 years, so not quite as impressive as 17 years, but the sound is there, still. It's one of my favorite things about summer here.
I live in Kern County California and while I don't have a favorite fact about Mountain Lions/Cougars, I can say that their jump is impressive. I saw one jump about 30ft across the Kern River. From one side, clean to the other. It was only about 20ft away from me on the same side of the river. I'm glad he didn't jump on me 😂
Here in the South, we get June bugs each summer, and they sound similar to cicadas. I guess the only way to tell would be if I saw one but really don't want to stick around to find out.
Depends on the species for me. Some years they can make a much more grating sound than others, and louder, too. My favorite variety have a synchronized pattern to their song that goes like 'WHER WHER Wheeeerrr... WHER WHER Wheeeerrr...' a lot better than the ones who do the constant shrill droning.
I find the annual cicadas to be soothing cause there are a smaller number but during out 17 year cicada they are so ear piercing it's hard to carry on a conversation outside.
The cicada mating ritual had a profound affect on my life in a tangential way. Thirty five years ago I met my future wife in the Denny's in Franklin Park Illinois. We took an interest in one another and started dating. One day a week or so later we stopped at a small park in Park Ridge to play catch (Baseball, not cricket...that would have been too perfect.) Anyway, it was a cicada year, and she was positioned about 20 feet from a honeysuckle bush that was burdened with hundreds of cicadas. While we were playing (she was pretty damned good) a cicada ran into her and went right down the neck of her tee shirt and started furiously buzzing around down there. She started yelling and pulling at her shirt to get the thing out, but apparently it had found a cozy place to hang on and flap his wings, which resulted in her ripping her tee shirt off to free the little bastard. This is about the time that the profound effect on my life occurred. We were married about 6 weeks later and the rest is history...we are still together. (Just for fun, I looked up the GPS coordinates of this epic event in case you want to try your luck 😝 42° 0'32.96"N 87°51'27.55"W)
The term "periodical cicadas" makes me wonder if there's a magazine called "Cicada Monthly." My favorite fact about cougars is that they don't roar. They make a variety of noises, sometimes sounding like chirping birds, sometimes like crying babies, and sometimes like meowing housecats. They also purr.
I don't know if it's true or not, but I heard that if a big cat can roar, they can't purr, and vice versa. Anyone else hear about that or have information to the contrary?
Other than the fact that our house is covered in cicada shells, we didn’t really notice a huge swarm invasion that disrupted our lives. Buuuut there were a few days when we saw the bird version of D-Day as the birds were dive bombing and caching cicadas out of the air in a giant swarm. It was an absolute feast and massacre.
As a child I loved to play with cicada exoskeletons. You could hook them on your shirt and wear them! Lol. This all happened in Arkansas at my grandmothers house. We also chased and collected fireflies in a jar!
Yeah, those are the annual cicadas and we get those too later in the year. These are the periodic cicadas, and the difference is they come out in the most insane numbers. You couldn’t walk down the path to the front door of my office without being divebombed by them. We sit by the windows, and we were just watch people walking in flapping their arms, and then we’d yell to the receptionist "cicada check", because there be one or two on their back. Also, the annual cicadas typically start they’re singing right around dusk. The periodic cicadas do it all day long.
I was just thinking that we haven’t heard much from the cicadas yet this year. I did find a dead Palo Verde beetle. Look them up. They are absolutely huge.
In California they are currently building a bridge for wild animals, such as cougars a.k.a. mountain lions, so that they can safely cross the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles. The bridge is expected to be completed in late 2024 or early 2025. It is hoped that the bridge will prevent the wildlife from being killed by cars and that it will expand their "genetic diversity". There was a famous Los Angeles cougar named P-22 who was quite the celebrity in the Griffith Park area (also famous for the Hollywood sign) who had to be euthanized in December 2022 due to several long term health issues. In May 2024 a new mountain lion was spotted on the western edge of Griffith Park that was once P-22's territory. The newcomer has not been tagged so there is little information available about the animal other than photographs.
Very well. My favorite fact about cougars is that I once observed a cougar casually ambling through my front yard. No, I did not go outside to introduce myself.
Near me, in the west suburbs of Chicago, they were incredibly loud, 92 dB in my back yard, with a background level of mid-70's - by way of comparison, last time I drove down the highway to downtown Chicago, I rolled down the windows, and rush hour traffic with the windows rolled down was about 75-78 dB
We had lots of them around my office in Wheeling, Illinois. Not only were they loud; they totally creeped me out. They would fly down from the trees going near my head. No no no no no.
Lol. I went to my local gas station the other day and thank God people understood when I went to my car I was flapping my arms around to avoid these shits.
Should have hopped in your car and come to the southwest suburbs. Downers Grove, Woodridge, Darien, Bolingbrook-literally millions of cicadas! Piles of them under trees. The sound was deafening!
I used to live in Downers Grove, Woodridge and Bolingbrook (I'm now in Aurora), and I can confirm Especially bad in DG. I remember the trees in that old small cemetery downtown being covered top to bottom with cicadas.
It's sad to me. Growing up, my family on both sides always lived in areas where Cicada are common. These days, those areas have been "developed", and the sounds of nature were replaced with cars.
Gawd! I'm Central Illinois and so glad they are gone! They were eerily, deafening loud. They flew around, bombarding people... Just glad the noise is over!!
dang, I was about to say the opposite! 😁 Here in Peoria, there are some isolated spots where I hear them, but generally they haven't been visible/audible. Not sure what to conclude about that....
@@SkyhawkSteve you don't want the sound! It flows to one pitch to another CONSTANTLY , all day. You walk out going to work, little shits are there for you.
@@cindyp9857 True.. I don't need to hear them all day. There are some other sorts of cicadas here that are less annoying, but look the same. Honestly, it's those beady little red eyes that are especially creepy! Good luck with them!
Side note. I let my kitties out on our enclosed porch (keep the door propped open) and they were scared at first from the sound. They hesitated going outside. Finally got the nerve and one of my boys started bringing cicadas into house to "finish off". One's somewhere in the kitchen, can't find. Also saw birds sweeping like buzzards around my street/house. This is nature :)
@@SkyhawkSteve I saw a distribution map of the two periodic broods and they didn't overlap much and there were a few areas in the middle of Illinois (sorry don't remember exact locations) where apparently neither brood was expected.
A couple of things about my experience with cougars/mountain lions: I spent my childhood hiking and walking and camping and playing in some deep wilderness. My dad would tease us about mountain lions. "Did you see any cougars?" He would ask. We would always say "No." He'd smile and say "That's alright. They saw you, though." His point being that they were there, they just didn't want to be seen. In my 53 years, the most I've ever seen of a cougar was a tail as it was running into some bushes. That was a decade ago.
Certain californians prove to 99% of other californians that they aren't on top of the food chain either..mountain lions are the LEAST concern to humans in that state
Laurence, there are different kinds of cicadas. The dog-dayccicadas come every summer, but the big broods of periodical cicadas come out every 13 or 17 years. I drove to Illinois from Maryland last month to hear them sing,
When I was a school boy in Tennessee I saw cicada's often flew into girl's long hair. They have these ridges on their legs (the cicadas) and they really stick into long hair. I always offered to remove them, and I knew how to do that. They appreciated the help (the girls) and that made me happy.
In Cincinnati Ohio, When I was a teen in the 80s I made money shoveling cicadas from peoples driveway and walks unblocking their front doors w a snow shovel lol.
The last time I experienced the periodic cicadas, they were so loud that with the car windows up, the air conditioning on, and the radio playing you could hear the cicadas!
Katydids serenade you for a few hours in the evening and then know when to shut up. Periodical cicadas scream and scream and scream until you want to rip your ears off.
Here in the Deep South of.... Canada, I heard my first Cicada of the summer season today. We don't have cyclical cicadas-- (Canada banned anything to do with Prime Numbers in 1893) we just have regular ones. So, we don't get crunchy underfoot cicadas, just nice summer background music cicadas. I happen to love them, but not in the Alabama way. It's platonic.
It's not just a sound. They will swarm and fly around so much. I have looked out my window to see them flying. My kitties were scared at first to go on my porch, I have an enclosed porch, then one little shit.started capturing them and bringing into the house.
Oh my god you just won 🏆 this is the best response yet. I literally laughed so hard I snorted, in a very unladylike manner. And go called out on it. 😂😂😂
As a child in the early 60’s I remember a cicada year where there were so many around that walking home from school I could shuffle my feet through the exoskeletons on the sidewalk like they were fall leaves.
I'm laughing at the guy watching Lawrence on the telly... Hearing the relatively few cicadas we have helps one understand how Egyptians would fear a locust swarm.
When I was a kid we colloquially called cicadas, "locusts" I was 15 when I found out they had a different name, long after I stopped chasing girls with them.
Here in New Jersey we have cicada songs every year. But I remember one summer about 30 years ago when my part of the state was absolutely inundated by cicadas! The suburban sidewalks around my house were littered with cicada wings that had been cast off by feasting predators. I collected many of them and saved them in a glass jar that I labeled “Fairy Wings”.
Cicadas are fascinating and horrifying at the same time! I’m in Indiana and our 17-year cicadas (brood X) came out in 2021. The noise was deafening. I have videos saved showing the noise to be 80-100 decibels just from neighborhood trees. Crazy!
My favorite fact about Cicadas is that THEY ARE ON THE WEST COST! But they're not periodical, they're here every year! We have "Dog-day Cicada"'s all around my area, buzzing away.
I remember when I was a kid in Ohio my mom worked at the Girl Scout Camp one cicada summer. You couldn’t take a step outside without them crunching Uber your feet. Those big, beady eyes still creep me out. I live in NorCal now. So cougar fact: aka mountain lion. If you hear the sound of a woman crying whilst hiking in nature, it’s probably a cougar. (Or an older woman jilted by her younger man.)
The Dunn Museum in Libertyville, IL (a suburb of Chicago) has a really great exhibit all about cicadas! My nieces and nephews were in town last week, and really enjoyed learning all about these neat little critters. They don't have any on the east coast where they live, so this visit to Cicada Central was a fun experience. Look up the Lake County Forest Preserve District. The Dunn Museum in Libertyville, Illinois. I believe the exhibit is open through August, or maybe just the beginning of August? Definitely open through July, so don't miss it!
There were millions upon millions of periodic cicadas and they made an ear-ringing din in areas of highest concentration. It was quite a spectacle. Fun fact: Brood XIII consists of three separate species of cicada that all emerge on the same 17-year cycle. (By the way, Fun Fact #2: I recently learned that it doesn't feel so good when a cicada attempts to land on your eyeball. 😝)
@@santamanone 13 and 17 year. Cicadas are heard in many states year after year after year, every year the Cicadas you hear were laid 13 or 17 years ago.
I think you should do a cross country trip and see all the different landscapes and cultures across our grand country. What if the anticipation of "where will they go next?!" might just be the ticket to push your subscribers up to a million?!
Lived in Chicago for many years, I heard cicadas every summer but don’t remember ever seeing any. I used to see fire flies every summer too. Even though it’s really hot, summer is the best time in Chicago
Is that right? Where are you? I'm in DFW and in my little area, they are pretty scarce this year, so far. Not complaining as I hate those ugly bastards. They chase me screaming!
female cicadas gouge a narrow trench in the new-growth green branch tips in which they lay their eggs. As the eggs hatch and the nymphs start to grow, they feed off of the tree branch sap, killing the branch tip. You will see lots of trees with branch tips that have browned off as if they were having a very localized Fall season. Once the branch tips beging dying off, the nymphs fall to the ground and then dig in for another 17 years, or 1 year, or 3 years, or 5 years or 11 years or 13 years - depending on the brood that came out that season and your geographical location.
One of my favorite childhood memories is waking up super early one morning and finding freshly emerged cicadas drying out by their empty shells. I had only ever seen their shells left behind on trees before that moment, so I thought it was pretty cool to find them "mid-shed".
My favorite cougar fact: Cougars are the largest cat that purrs. I don't actually know if that's true: I've heard other big cats make noises that sound pretty much like purring to me. It could be, though, that theirs are low-throated hums, rather than produced by the specific bit of throat cartilage needed to produce an "official" purr. I love the sound of cicadas. I remember hearing it as a child - a susserating curtain of sound - and, being a child, just accepted it as the background noise of summer. Since I've lived on the West Coast all my adult life, I'm unlikely to ever hear it live again, which makes me sad.
I have moved south to a place that doesn't have cicadas, and when I went home for a visit a few weeks ago I found the cicada song to be very comforting, homey, and nostalgic ❤
My favorite fact about Cougars is that my neighbor saw one on his back porch, and not on mine. Oh, and they are also known as Mountain Lions, Pumas, Panthers, and Catamounts.
My husband and I saw a cougar casually crossing the road near the Cougar Mountain Wildlife Park east of Seattle. Amazing, but we were happy to be in our car.
About 25-30 years ago, I was at a National Wildlife Refuge in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I asked one of the rangers if there were any cougars in the U.P. He immediately said "NO!" The civilian volunteer, sitting nearby said "I had one in my front yard". Several years and a few trail cam pictures later, the DNR finally said "Yes" 😁
Now that the weather is scorching hot, the annual cicadas have started their chorus in central Texas. It's such a signature sound here that a local news station uses it as background sound in their ad rolls.
I've always loved the drone of cicadas on summer evenings. Somehow, it's such a comforting sound - but maybe that's because I grew up in the South so it brings back childhood memories.
Cicadas appear every year even though the broods are 13 and 17yrs old. Some years the broods are larger then others, but I can't tell the difference. They're all just loud as hell every year. 😆
I lived over 40 years without knowing people ate cicadas. I also read that it is ill advised to eat more than 17 as they can be toxic or cause gastrointestinal distress or something. All I remember is that it just confirmed my hard NO to eating creepy critters. I do miss the cicada drone when I don't hear it. It's not a proper summer evening if the frogs or the cicadas aren't getting their freak on.
As a lifelong west coaster, Ive never seen a cicada, and my favorite thing about cougars, which are also called mountain lions, is that they hardly ever attack or kill humans unlike humans themselves, who do it often.
There’s mad cicadas on the west coast too! It’s so deafening here in Arizona you can’t even concentrate sometimes, I’ve also heard them really loud in Utah and New Mexico. I can guarantee you 100% there’s multiple species in California too. There’s nowhere in the U.S. that doesn’t have cicadas
I haven't seen a cougar after decades of camping, driving and hiking washington state. Lately a few folks have been killed by cougar, big Big Tip; Do Not Try Outrunning A Cougar On A Bicycle!! It was bad. Look biggest
Locusts are NOT extinct in the wild in North America. The Rocky Mountain locust is, but it is not the only species of locust native to North America. The High Plains locust (Dissosteira longipennis - that means long wing, you sicko) is still alive in the wild, and is frequently found swarming in summer where I live in the northern Great Plains, although to the rest of America it is considered rare, and hasn't had a plague swarm since the 1930s, it is very much not extinct. I just saw a few last week.
Hi from southern Illinois. We have more than a big superman statue and a bigger bag boy statue, we had at least 758,489, 013 cicadas. I had to mow twice during the plague, they bite. Im put off shrimp forever
I’m so glad that you got to see some cicadas. I know that there were tons of them at Brookfield Zoo, where the sound was almost deafening. Also, I saw a lot of cicadas while going out to College of DuPage for my Japanese class. Still, this is nothing like what was it, 1973? That emergence was insane. Even in the urban areas there were so many cicadas that the sidewalk went crunch when you walked on it. And dear me, Laurence, you are more morbid than I am. I have got a few more years on than you do, and just maybe I will see the next merchants of the cicadas at age 77.
They were falling out of trees by my house😮 I had 2 land on my shirt ,one my leg and one in my hair 😮. I got in my car then they started making that noice !!😮😮
At their last appearance, I took my kids to Brookfield Zoo. While standing in line for an attraction, a few jumped into my hair. The other people 8:41 in line had quite a show watching me try to get those !@#$ things out of my hair!
We get cicadas in Lake Tahoe and throughout Northern California occasionally, and we have had appearances in our own backyard here in Nevada. I remember, as a kid in the 70s, taking a vacation at Camp Richardson, on the California side of Lake Tahoe and the bugs were deafening. I never saw a single cicada in Los Angeles in the 50 years I lived there. Sad, really. I kind of like them, even if they can drown out those nasty gas powered leaf blowers everyone uses for some reason.
I'm down in Champaign (about two hours south of Chicago for anyone wondering) and we didn't have it either. Which shocked me! I was honestly disappointed in the lack of screaming cicadas!
The Rocky Mountain Cicada was wiped out when farmers began plowing up their breeding grounds for new farmland. It was completely unintentional at the time.
When the 13 year cicadas emerged here in WV we had NONE in our backyard. Because our dogs spent 2 weeks digging them out of the ground and eating as they hatched. Poor bugs. But we had lots of cicadas everywhere else. Front yard, driveway, house, sidewalk, and of course all the trees not protected by the dogs!
I live in Alabama. Two times I have seen mountain lions. About three years ago I saw a mountain lion in north Jefferson county. Another time , six years ago I saw a mountain lion in Calhoun County on a 28,000 acre National Guard training center.
Cicadas do not lay eggs on leaves. Remember, in 17 years those leaves will be long gone. Cicadas lay their eggs in mature branches. So if those trees are around in 17 years they will have progeny. Cicadas also prefer certain tree species over others. So your observations of concrete and number of trees are correct. You also need to factor age and type if trees. With all the forest preserves around Chicago you should have been able to find places with an abundance of them. I am sorry that your first experience with American cicadas was less spectacular than you hoped. My childhood ecperience of cicadas so abundant the sidewalks were covered and you could not walk anywhere without the crunching sound under your feet is not my favorite childhood memory.
