Dog Day Cicadas

The boys have been finding the remains of bugs that have molted on a few of the trees in the yard. We had to look a bit to figure out what they were but apparently they are Cicadas. I had no idea we even had them in New Hampshire but here they are. I had heard of the problems they have in the south but didn't know there were different species. I found a nice article from NPR that explains it best. Here is a cool video we found of them molting.

"There's a new song out there in nature's ever-changing seasonal chorus. It's a song that returns each year with the hot, hazy days of summer. The dog-day cicada gets its name from the dog days of summer, a time when Sirius, known as the Dog Star, rises with the sun. The Romans thought this brightest star of all helped cause the hottest days of all.

Listen for a long metallic whine as a male advertises for a female, usually from high in a pine tree. It's the periodical cicadas of warmer latitudes that get all the attention, emerging every 13 or 17 years in numbers that sometimes reach Biblical proportion. But New Hampshire is home to annual cicadas only. They emerge each year, modest in number. No drama. No damage to their host trees.

The adult dog-day cicada resembles a huge house fly with large bulbous eyes and long transparent wings. The male's impressive song is the product of muscle and membrane vibrating across a drum-like abdominal cavity – similar to popping a tin can lid in and out, but so quickly the pops merge into one sound. It's a sound well designed to attract females from near and far.

Cicada eggs hatch into nymphs that burrow underground and feed on juices sucked from tree roots. The notorious 17-year cicadas spend 17 years underground, but our benign dog-day cicadas crawl forth each summer, climb the nearest tree, and morph into a winged adults that soon adds a unique and defining voice to the seasonal sounds of summer."