Jaci Dawn

Since the kids are not here (yet), I thought I’d sneak in a post and #338 photo.

I sneaked in some gardening time today, wrapping up the worst of the weeding and planting my measly, sad flower starts. The clouds kept obscuring the sun: it was lovely when the sun was out and downright sweater weather when the clouds floated through.

I had to weed around one of my lavender plants which is always a dicey operation what with the honey bees and the bumble bees that swarm them. Only there were no bees! The few bees I saw out were swarming over the other lavender and they were very few in number: a couple honey bees and a couple bumble bees. A cloud of sadness fell over me: has the weather been so cold that we lost our honey bees? Or did something else happen? My yard has always been a haven for bees!

While I contemplated the quiet of the garden (no buzzing), I continued working my way around the flowers on my hands and knees.

Then I saw this THING.

It looked sort of like a bumble bee at first glance, but not fuzzy or yellow. In fact, it was quite green.

Don said it looked like a Jerusalem cricket, but we both knew better. It wasn’t as big as one and it wasn’t yellow. And it didn’t have big cricket legs.

I put it in a jar while I sat down with a guide book. The thing looked positively crustacean with little folded up crab arms, but I knew it was an insect (six legs). A very slow moving insect of some sort, possibly a cricket or some sort of nymph. So I started in the grasshopper, crickets & cicada section. Still, the back legs were all wrong.

I flipped over the last page of the grasshopper section and there it was.

A cicada nymph! See those brown shells the cicadas are hanging onto? That was what form they were in before they split their shell and emerged with wings. And that thing is what my green thing looked like!

Unfortunately, the Grand Western Cicada is not found here in the Pacific Northwest.

Fortunately, the periodical cicada is.

I’m very familiar with cicadas in the adult stage. I’ve never seen a nymph before.

I carefully put the little bugger back on the ground under the Hawthorne bush so it could make it’s slow journey to the tree where it will harden and the adult cicada will emerge.

I love periodical cicadas and their sudden appearance. They live between 13 and 17 years underground before burrowing upward and changing into that bizarre green form that I found in my garden. Then they emerge from the soil and make their slow way to a tree. They climb the tree and begin the last step of their metamorphosis: their exoskeleton hardens, then cracks down the back and the adult cicada emerges.

If all goes well, hundreds of cicadas emerge at the same time, all part of a “brood”. I’m not sure all will go well because now I think the mole that has been burrowing around our yard has been hunting the cicada grubs and nymphs. I think I know what the grubs look like: we’ve been finding these huge, weird grubs in the soil every time we garden. There are a lot of those grubs in the ground and if they are cicadas, then maybe we will have a wonderful harmony of cicada song in a few days.

I did a quick search on the Internet, but most sites only deal with cicadas in the Midwest and there’s a dearth of information on cicadas in Oregon. That’s sad. I’ve come across emergent broods many times in the 33 years I’ve lived here (mostly in the Steens Mountains but also here in the Willamette Valley) and there were cicada broods that emerged in the Santa Rosa Mountains of northern Nevada when I was a little girl.

While there were very few bees in my yard today, there was something magical there, too. That magic came in a pretty ugly package, but when it is fully emerged and it begins to “sing”, it will be a fully beautiful magic.

It made my day, anyway.