Displaying items by tag: katydid
(News alert: Katy did it!) Seventeen-year cicadas were just an opening act. Now the woods are rolling with the rhythm of our annual insects.
A true katydid is shown here. It’s one of the main insects that provides a permanent soundtrack to your summer life in the Knoxville area. Stephen Lyn Bales/Hellbender Press
What’s that buzz? We thought Brood X was over.
In case you haven’t noticed: It’s hot!
The “dog days of summer,” are so called because the season coincides with the period of time when the brightest star Sirius, aka the Dog Star, rises and sets with the Sun: early July through August into September.
The ancients believed that when Sirius and the Sun were in the sky together, the days were hotter. I think they got it right.
August has never been that thrilling to me, more of a month to endure. The birds have finished raising their families and are going through their late-season molt. Some of the migratory birds have already started to move south. But that doesn’t mean that our backyards are totally silent because late summer is cacophonous with insects.
During the day, the trees are filled with large, green cicadas that generally spend three years underground in their larval stage, but they are not all in sync like Brood X was, so each summer we have plenty that mature to collect en masse in our neighborhoods.
To attract females, the male cicadas do the chainsaw buzzing, but the songs are not made with vocal chords but rather special organs on the sides of their abdomens called “tymbals.” In effect, their sides vibrate loudly.
Locally in the Knoxville region we have five species of these annual cicadas. Early in the morning and into the afternoon, swamp cicadas (Neotibicen tibicen) are calling. They are also known as morning cicadas because they usually crank up by 10 a.m. with a long uninterrupted rattle that builds in intensity.