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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (62761)	5/26/2002 10:29:35 AM
From: Crocodile	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

My first banner year for them was 1970 in Maryland. I also experienced '87 in New Jersey. Unlike the every-summer cicadas, the seventeen-year variety makes a continuous sound instead of a several-second discrete call. And the sound of the 17s in full cry is EXACTLY like the sound of continuous phaser fire from the old original Star Trek series. Scotty, I need More Power!! Well, these are an annual kind, as I hear them every summer, but they do resemble the Star Trek phaser... or a high-pitched whine from a buzz saw blended with a certain sonorous violin-bow-scraping-over-strings off-key grind. The whine starts off low, then builds in pitch and volume, the intensity curving upwards to a crescendo...then a quick pull back followed by abrupt silence. It is sometimes possible to walk to the source of the whine. The Cicadas that make this sound are monstrous in size. Scary things if you don't like large-winged insects. They probably eat sparrows for breakfast. A couple of times over the years, I've seen them in busy parking lots, zooming around terrifying shoppers. Nothing sends people rushing for cover faster than a large bug with a 4 inch wingspan, swooping and diving outside of a grocery store. (o: One time, when I was doing a bit of odd work at a place with a car wash, one of the kids that worked there found a whopping big dead cicada on the pavement in the parking lot. He stuck some masking tape to the underside of it, then stuck it to the steering wheel of one of the other kid's cars so that it would be the first thing he would see when he climbed in to go to lunch. As expected, Kid #2 got in behind the wheel of his car to drive to the local fast food joint, but then made an immediate, shrieking exit within seconds. Which reminds me! I found a big dead Cicada last year and I brought it home, but I can't remember where I put it! I'll have to go and look for it right now. BTW, speaking of large insects, have you ever seen a Dobson Fly? Last summer, a biologist friend and I found a ton of their larvae (known as Hellgrammites) under thin sheets of limestone in a river near here. The Hellgrammites could give you a horrendous bite if they happened to get you. The flies look pretty nasty, but apparently they don't bite, although someone recently told me otherwise. The wingspan of an adult Dobson Fly is about 5 inches, so they tend to give some people a bit of a fright. In case you don't know what kind of insect I'm talking about, here's a photo of one that I found online: unl.edu Nice, huh? The larvae have much the same head, but have a wide, flat, wiggling body with a whole mess of legs like a centipede. The ones we found were about 4 inches long. Apparently, they make great fish bait IF you can avoid being bitten. (o: