Friday was a pretty warm day — highs in the 80s and humid. It was a gorgeous afternoon, and I spent a few hours wandering around my landscape. Our slow spring may have actually arrived…. Then yesterday, on a beautiful Saturday morning, I stepped outside and noticed the first adult cicada from the 2013 emergence of Brood II on the exterior garage wall.
Oh, ok, one or two cicadas are all that I’d found. So far, so good! Then I looked in the vinca groundcover along the front landscaping beds…. Lots and lots of cicadas emerging from their shells. Wow!
I watched in fascination as they turned from a white or cream-colored body to a darker body. Their wings straightened out. And in a few hours, several were practicing their flying over the front lawn.
Some cicadas had trouble emerging from their shells and died in the process. Also, others had deformed wings. Using grub control in the lawn could have possibly caused the deformities according to what I’ve read.
Interestingly enough, quite a number of birds flocked to our lawn, happily hopping around and sampling soft cicadas as they emerged from their nymph shells. Even one of the local foxes was sniffing around in the lawn in the evening and lapping up cicadas as we watched from inside the house. Earlier in the day, squirrels were snapping up the cicada nymphs. The neighbor’s Tabby cat was playing with a cicada on our driveway.
For more info on cicadas, check out the Magicicada page!
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