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Crow’s Nest: The sounds of summer

July 21, 2014

By Daniel Barringer, Preserve Manager

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The cicadas started calling  around July 8. Before that, we might have had summer temperatures, and the calendar said summer was here, but it really isn’t summer until we hear them. I call it “high summer,” even as the days have already started getting shorter. When I was young I remember going to scout camp in the Poconos in summer and it was quiet at home when I left, and not so quiet a week later when I returned. A bit earlier in my life I used to make armies of the dried exoskeletons after their emergence from them.

I don’t find them is such numbers at the preserve today, usually just one at a time. I don’t know if they are more common in the concrete and split-level home suburbs of my youth, or whether their numbers have dwindled over time.

This one was hanging on the chicken coop this morning waiting for the sun to get a little higher.