The noisy visitors are gone…

The day finally came where I walked out the door and noticed a strange thing: All I could hear was the wind blowing, the birds singing, the children playing. The roar of Brood V cicada was gone; that loud undulating cry of the males seeking hanky-panky was absent. Too much information? I know. To us it's cacophony, but to them it's a symphony of love. And no more dive-bombing us unsuspecting humans that like to go outside. Their bombing was unintentional, I’m sure – they just were in a frenzied state and didn’t know what they were doing or where they were going! You can read my original post about cicadas here.

In their absence, signs of their destruction lay all around. Empty shells, where the insects were sheltered for a very long period of time until they hatched, lay in piles all over the yard.

Many tips of my maple tree branches (they only live in certain trees) are brown and crumbling and getting ready to drop off at some point. I’m assuming this is where the new batch of cicada crawled to, buried themselves in the branches and wait to fall off and once again burrow to their new home in the earth. Whew!
What a process!  If you click on the photos you'll get a better view of the brown branch tips.

I drove down a nearby street and the owners of a home had built gigantic screened-in frames to place over their small, maybe newly planted Japanese Maples. They did what the experts recommended: cover your small trees. When I was able to try to take a photo, the cages were gone - because the cicadas were gone. That was a lot of work to protect their trees, but I'm sure the trees cost a lot of money.

The best thing about the invasion  – if you can look at it this way (and I do) is that the cicada’s have completely aerated our lawns. About ¼ inch wide holes, maybe an inch apart pepper the landscape which will allow our lawns to receive water like they never had before (my lawn anyway). I figure between the holes and the break-down of the exoskeletons , our lawns will be pretty healthy!

I will never stop being fascinated by this Cicada circle of life. I’m sure there are equally amazing animal and insect life-cycles in the world, but this one comes to our back doors and lets us share in their brief visit on top of the earth.

Have any of you experienced a cicada invasion?

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Happy gardening, my friends~
~Ann