Cicada videos

Although there are still some emerging, the cicadas are in full find-a-mate mode, which means noise. Loud, loud noise. (If you're not sure what I'm talking about by "emergence", click here to read my posts about these 13-year cicadas in St. Louis.)

I've captured some videos to help you get a sense of it. I recommend cranking up the volume or listening to them in headphones.

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The first two videos were taken in my back garden, where there are no trees overhead. The cicada calls are a little more muted this way. In the morning video they're just "buzzing" mainly, which creates a low hum in the background. In the afternoon video they're going full force.

The next was taken out in front of the house underneath the tree that I used for most of my photos, and it is really loud!

You can't really get a sense of the volume until you realize you can't hear the rustling bamboo leaves at all even though they're inches from the camera's microphone.

Finally a couple of close-ups of the cicadas in the trees. The females don't seem to move around much, letting the males come to them:

The males fly around quite a bit, and of course are making all of the noise. After much searching, I finally found a male in the process of calling:

I could be wrong about my identification of male and female in the above videos, so please let me know in the comments if I'm mistaken!

After shooting the first video in the front yard (the one with the bamboo) I put earplugs in, as it was just getting to be too much.

"Only" a few more weeks of this before relative quite returns to the garden.

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