I found one

A cicada:

Albeit quite a dead one.

Here's a little size comparison:

I wonder if I can get Courtney to hold it tomorrow. ;-)

So now any of you who didn't know before what cicadas look like, now you know. And now I know. In person. This was my first, that I can remember, anyway. And I won't mind if it's my last.

(Just what you wanted to see, right Becky?)

Update note to Dale: Tonight there were more of them singing. It was like there were several choirs of them scattered around, and each choir was singing differently. There were different rhythms, and one group had no rhythm at all. Interesting!

Evening sounds

As requested by Mark, here are our cicadas as they sounded last night... with a few crickets chirping in between the cicada rounds.

And on and on they "sang"......

The 'thump' in the middle was the cat jumping off the deck railing. You should've seen the video I tried taking before this one. I was steadying the camera on the railing, and she came over and was licking my hands and purring loudly into the microphone. Then you could see the bottoms of her feet as she jumped over the camera. As a grand finale, she dangled her tail in front of the lens. Great help, she was! :-)

Cicadas

As I was mowing the other day, I happened to notice these "lovelies" on a tree trunk, and I had to stop mowing and go for the camera.

They are, of course, just the empty "shells" that the flying cicadas hatched out of.

I noticed that each one has this little white string-like thing in it. I wonder what that was for.

Below is one near a daddy-long-legs spider, for size comparison.

UGLY, aren't they? Courtney was brave the next day, though, and examined them with me. She even dared to touch them (once I assured her they were dead and couldn't move).

I wish I could've gotten pics of the hatch. I've never seen a flying cicada, but an online search showed me that they are quite ugly, too. They're also very noisy when there are a lot of them!