There’s a pulsating shriek, the call of dozens of cicadas yelling into the heat of the early summer morning. Their big, fat bodies thud against the house before careening back off into the sky. Many become food for our local growing family of butcherbirds. You can find the nest by following the noise of the freshly plucked cicada as it screams through the air from within the adult’s beak.
As ear piercing as the sound can be, I will never stop recommending that you head out as the night cools, torch in hand, to watch the breathtaking beauty as the cicada sheds its skin.
You may have noticed round holes in your yard. If you look around, you will find the exoskeleton of the cicada that has already transformed into the noisy insects we know (and kind of love).
In reality, the process for the cicada is a long and painstaking one. The nymphs emerge out of the earth where they spend the majority of their life. Some Australian species (of which there are over 200!) are thought to live for six to seven years underground.
Come nightfall, they use their specially adapted front legs to dig out of the ground and make their way up a nearby vertical surface, be it a tree, a stump or, like our local cicadas, up the clothesline.
They cling on like this and then slowly, their body making almost undetectable vibrations, the back of their exoskeleton begins to split open. This is the best time to pull up a chair, but fair warning, this part takes time, a long time, often an hour or so. You will start to see the fresh body of the adult underneath, brightly coloured and sometimes shimmering with spots of gold.
In slow motion, the cicada leans backwards, stretching its legs in and out, waiting for them to harden. Once dry, it will pull itself up in one motion, grabbing the old shell and freeing the remainder of its abdomen. Jutting out from the body are four small wing buds, which the cicada slowly inflates by pumping them with fluid.
It stays like that until they harden enough for the cicada to make its maiden flight, heading off to spend its final few weeks feeding and mating and, if it is male, singing very, very loudly.
Watch the time-lapse here.
