A Brood of Small Cicadas (Shallow Thoughts)

A Brood of Small Cicadas

Our trees in La Senda have been ticking madly for about a week.

The noise had been worrying me. Some of our drought-stressed piñons might not have enough sap to fight off bark beetles (we lost four trees last year to the beetles). On the other hand, cicadas do make clicking noises (like an orchestra tuning up, preparing for the symphony). And the ticking noise came from junipers as much as piñons; bark beetles are usually species-specific..

But eventually we were able to find a few of the tickers and photograph them. Definitely cicadas, though they're noticeably smaller than the big broods of 2014 and 2019, and greener, with bigger eyes (here's a 2019 cicada for comparison).

It's remarkably hard to locate cicadas to photograph them, even when you're surrounded by junipers that each have several of them clicking loudly. Once you see them, you can see the movement as they make their ticking noises, and as they slowly work their way along a branch.

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