Cicadas

Now that school is out, you often see kids wandering around in the mornings looking up into the trees carrying butterfly nets larger than themselves. Ahhh, isn't that cute! And they're catching ... really large ugly insects. Not quite so cute. And ... OH MY G... WHY is it SCREAMING!



Oh, it's a cicada, of course it screams. Before I came to Japan my ideas about cicadas were limited to Southern, Gone With the Wind style book passages, where people were gently lulled to sleep by the song of the cicadas. I imagined they were similar to grasshoppers. How wrong I was.

Cicadas are very large, very ugly flying beetle type insects that tend to fly straight at you instead of away from you if you're in their flight vector. They start calling as soon as the sun rises and stop as the temperature rises around noon. They would be better than an alarm clock if that wasn't generally when I'm trying to GET to sleep. When I first heard them 'singing' I thought it was some weird type of motorcycle engine revving. Why would I think it was a cicada? I mean these things are supposed to sing. SING dammit! Not sound like some strange alien hybrid helicopter and bandsaw.

One is loud enough to be painful at close range. (It's true! I looked it up and everything.) Imagine what hordes of them sound like, massed in every inch of greenery along the street. You can't hear yourself think. And of course they make great playthings for the kids. However when you disturb them they stop 'singing' and start screaming. A loud, angry, cranky scream. They sound crankier than me waking up too early.

One thing I never thought I'd look forward to when getting home was the insects. Alberta, where the prairies are vast and the insects are ... quiet.