Cicada update: babies

Look who hatched today! The first baby of Brood XIX periodical cicadas! With lots of luck, this new nymph will survive the next 13 years underground, then emerge and molt into adulthood in May 2037. Right now, it is barely bigger than the egg it came from, but you can see six legs, two antennae, and cute little eyes.

Part of that luck starts with the egg itself. If eggs are deposited in a twig that snaps, browns, and hangs (“flagging”) or in a twig that breaks onto sunny lawn, the eggs are not likely to survive. They dry out if not protected by living plant tissue. And then, at hatch time, if a nymph drops to any other surface but soil, it is doomed. And if the merest breeze wafts it to the roof, driveway, bird bath, street: doomed. And if it gets mown, trimmed, blown, sprayed w/ any pesticide: doomed. And if it gets spotted by even one of a zillion predators above-ground or below: doomed.
Good luck, little cicada!

New nymphs will be hatching for several weeks now, so watch for falling, tiny, white creatures. I’m pinning black t-shirts to the clothesline, the better to spot the contrast. I’m also watching our dog’s black-furred back as we walk her, in case neighborhood nymphs drop on for a ride.

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By the way, I wrote a book

After a festival or a hike, my husband will ask, “Did you tell anyone about your book?” or “Did you mention you have a blog?” and I will answer “No.”
Honestly, I forget. And I’d rather talk about Mosquito Buckets of Doom or Caterpillar Host Plants or Native Habitats than talk about myself, even when “myself” is 100% relevant to the topic at hand.

So, I am extra grateful that Margaret Renkl let slip that my forthcoming book is finally coming forth.
She put two surprise shout-outs in her essay in The New York Times, “The Cicadas are Here, Singing a Song for the Future” (link). While quoting from one of my cicada Instagram posts, she mentioned my book, “This is How a Robin Drink: Essays on Urban Nature.”

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Meet a Periodical Cicada (life cycle)

Greetings, Cicada fans!
My goal is to capture every stage of the life cycle during this Brood XIX emergence.
Hatchings are the next step, but till then, here goes…
Let’s meet a periodical cicada.

This cicada is 13 years old:

His story:
13 years ago, his mom laid an egg in twig in a tree. Six weeks after that, the eggs hatched, the new nymphs fell to the soil, found a crack, and burrowed inside to suck on tree rootlets.
For 13 years he and his siblings ate, peed, grew. They wriggled out of their skins four times before their final outfit, which included brand new accessories: wings.

**If the tree is cut down during the 13-years, the cicadas will not survive.**

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Periodical Panic, Part 2

Part 1 tried to calm panic about tree damage, noise, stink, inconvenience.
Part 2 will try to stir panic, but on behalf of the cicadas.

Here’s a new yard sign I wish I could sneak all over town. Even though many of us had a “No Mow April” sign, some of us need this new one, just for a few days: “No Mow Cicada.”

**Can we please delay our obsessively tidy, short-bladed, weekly mow and blows? For another week or maybe two?**

^{(^not a real sign, just a real digital image)}

Cicada emergence is well underway, and in some areas almost over, but our lawncare is killing them before they get a chance to mate.

It’s all about timing. These cicadas have spent 13 years underground prepping for the moment they emerge from the soil, climb a vertical thing, hang on tight, and break out of their nymphal exoskeleton. This final transition can take hours. They start to appear at dusk, but by morning many are still searching for a safe spot, or are mid-way through their final molt, or are still hanging to let their white, dough-soft bodies sclerotize into stiff, black, flight-ready condition. New adults don’t even try to fly until the sun warms them, and sometimes not until afternoon. When startled, females drop to the ground. And all cicadas are notoriously clumsy fliers.

So when a lawn crew arrives with lawnmowers, trimmers, leafblowers, pesticide sprayers, nearly all the newly emerged cicadas are doomed. Lawncare may be their most successful predator yet, and unlike the predators with whom cicadas evolved, a lawnmower does not reach “predator satiation.” A lawnmower never tires of eating cicadas. There is no end of cicadas that lawncare can kill.
Until there is an end of cicadas.

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First Week of April: Trees

A roundup of quick Sidewalk Nature updates: one warning and three wonders.

Trouble with Double

Kwanzan cherry trees don’t feed pollinators or birds. They look great two weeks of the year but they don’t support our foodweb. Prunus serrulata ‘Kwanzan’ / ‘Kanzan.’

My concern is that when people have room to plant one tree, this is the one they’ll want. It is cultivated for pretty, and pretty it is, but it doesn’t have nectar, doesn’t make fruit, and as a nonnative congener, its leaves support only a fraction of the Lepidoptera species a native Prunus / cherry can.

But at the Cherry Blossom Festival this month, festival-goers can walk away with a free Kwanzan cherry tree from the Nashville Tree Foundation.

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Nashville Mustard Tour: a Trace of the Trace

Keen to see Nashville Mustard while it lasts? It only blooms a few weeks each spring, and now’s the time. Why go see it? It’s yellow and gorgeous, it’s a mini superbloom, it’s a good photo op, and a true native. Think of it as a remnant of our historic grasslands, or as I like to imagine: a trace of the Trace. Trace, as in buffalo roads, when bison travelled to the salt lick that “made” Nashville (near what is now Bicentennial Mall.)

This post is to show where the Mustard is, so you can visit your nearest site, or go see them all.
And, it’s a happy update to last year’s post about Cutting the Mustard…

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Periodical Panic: Why Not To

Nashville’s 13-year periodical cicadas are coming this May, but what’s already here is panic.

For months, worried people have been asking about the 2024 “invasion.” Should they cover their trees? Should they wait to plant new trees? Should they reschedule outdoor events, and even indoor events? Will there be “too many” cicadas? No. The answer to all these questions is “no.”

3 reasons not to panic about “too many” cicadas:

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Winter Wasp

Today’s Backyard Nature: wasp rescue. I found this wasp floating—motionless, submerged—in a bucket of water. My bucket, my fault. I hadn’t realized that last month’s snow had blown into the porch, filled the bucket, and melted. So, I fished her out and laid her on a rock. Within a minute, she moved a front leg, and the other, and began walking to higher ground.

I should tell you she’s been a house guest since first frost. She showed up on the wall of the laundry room and stayed put for weeks. Then on a warm day, she got restless, and rather than let her wander into the kitchen, I carried her to the screened porch where I thought she’d be fine: safe from predators and bad weather, with places to hide and to escape. And then, boom, the bucket of (almost) doom.

Now I don’t know where she is.

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Cottonwood petiole gall

Underneath Cottonwood trees right now, you might find leftover leaves. They tell a story. A strange story.

It’s the story of a particularly interesting aphid. Virgin birth! Live birth! Eggs! Wings! No wings! Sexual! Asexual! Above ground! Below ground! Sucking mouthparts! No mouth at all!
These aphids do it all.

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Secret Sidewalk: eight late-November wonders

As fall drifts toward winter, nature doesn’t slow down, not really. Amazing things happen all around us, all the time. This site’s tagline: “Everyday wonders in everyday habitat loss” includes not just “natural” areas, but our own yards, trash alleys, parking lots, roadsides. For example, our Secret Sidewalk …

The Secret Sidewalk is a shortcut through 3 neighborhood blocks, but rather than running along a street, it runs between homes. It’s a 5-foot-wide Metro right-of-way flanked by property lines, and it feels intimate, despite crossing four roads, and despite tall privacy fences. It takes walkers past a mix of cultivated and wild. Exotics, natives, volunteers, invasives: all here. Signs of the season change daily.

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