Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Billions of cicadas emerging in North Carolina to create rare noise

We get crickets, night hawks, and frogs.


I like the sounds too.

I’ve made a giant set of copper pipe windchimes, enjoy hearing them too. Some of my pipes are 3ft long.
The wind cutting thru the trees and rain pinging my metal roofing is good noise. Especially for sleeping on a slow afternoon.

Wait for it........................



still waiting???






We all know who..................










Q........!!!

Lady where we stayed this weekend had a nice set, sounded great in the breeze. Thought to myself I should hit a scrap yard or maybe some new construction.

Jim, frogs are starting up good here. Still a mite chilly for crickets in the evenings. Nighthawks probably at least a month away still?

But, the snipe are here! Weird sounding birds.

Sounds sort of like tinnitus.

Robins right before dawn is my favorite sound.

The time varies by the brood. Some are annual, some, like this one, is 17 years. This year, the 17 year brood coincides with a 13 year brood. These 2 broods haven't emerged in the same year since Jefferson was president. For the most part, the broods' ranges don't overlap so we won't be getting a double dose except in a few small areas. Those areas are going to get noisy, though.

During the summer, the night sounds of insects and tree frogs along our coastline are amazing. It is part of what makes our coast so special, IMHO.

I seem to have different "favorites" depending on the time of year. I love hearing the sandhills when they arrive. The snipe are cool too. There's a couple of little waterways and seems every season there's a pair or two of willets that nest in the sagebrush near our seasonal creeks.

Right now I get serenaded by the meadowlarks every morning, along with the regular noise from the jays I feed.

Always look forward to the booming dives of the nighthawks.

Used to have some great horned owls around, not many rabbits or squirrels left, someone mentioned a disease. Somewhere I might have a picture of one of the owls sitting on our fence waiting to get to the dog pool for a drink or a bath. Wife was up early one morning and caught one taking a bath. I miss their hooting. Had a skunk in the driveway the other night and I could use a nice big owl around to remove every last one of them from around the place.

Geno, we just had a robin show up yesterday.

First one.


Meadowlarks are generally 10 to 14 days behind.

There aren't as many sounds as when I was a kid....and not just because of my hearing loss and terrible tinnitus.

Outside on a summer night the crickets, etc are very loud...when I'm wearing my hearing aids. When I'm not, they're all out of my hearing range and it's dead silent.

Maybe it was the paraquat used where they migrate to???

We're lucky enough to have good crops of juniper berries every couple of years. Robins will overwinter sometimes. Maybe some of our are headed your way, we had thousands in the area, now only a few (likely residents). They head up into the higher country as it starts to warm up.

Love to listen to the Katydids. Cicadas, not so much. It does have a tone very similar to tinnitus!
You can hear them even with earplugs in during the 17 year cycle.
Outside of the 17 year brood, I have only ever seen very few. Maybe I’m not looking very hard.
During 21 I was in Wells Valley, and they were all over the place on Sidling Hill, but in the valley itself I didn’t see as many as I did in Pleasantville over in Bedford County.
Could be less forest, more farm land in Fulton County.
Mom had passed on Thanksgiving in 03. We held the funeral the first day of deer season. So in mid May, Dave and I and Dad were putting up a Tombstone and fixing up the cemetery plot for Mom.
Dave’s kids and Ben musta caught several hundred, looking for the mythical “blue eyed” bug.
Since they had so many Dave and I took the kid’s fishing that evening.
Now some people love to fish. Me? I like to sit by the water, talk, and drink some beer!😀
We we’re catching so many fish that night that my beer was actually getting warm until I could finish it! Dave and I were constantly taking fish off, because the kids, all between 10 and 14, were afraid of getting stung by catfish.😭
I finally quit baiting my hook so I could finish a beer while it was still cold.😀
Reon

We went to Great Lakes when son completed basic. They were out then. You could hear the buzz driving down the freeway

Ive always heard copperheads love them some cicadas.

Favorite sound has to be Spring Peepers.
I’ve never understood how a cold blooded critter is out singing in February or March. At night.



Rarely hear them anymore or it would be Whippoorwills.
When I hear one,
It’s summer in the late 70s,
Pap and I are sitting on the canvas covered glider on his porch, he is lighting a Pall Mall with a Zippo.
Occasionally whistling back to the bird.
He passed 1979.

Today I can smell that first puff mixed with Zippo fluid.
Misty eyed, must be allergic to the smoke.😏

Every seventeen generations for the 13 year cicada and every thirteen generations for the 17 year they emerge at the same time.

Will they crossbreed? A complicated question…..

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19cvph1/will_the_13_and_17year_cicadas_crossbreed_this/

…but you can bet entomologists will be out there looking.

Up in NY State the katydids in the trees hang on well into the fall, by November there’s just a few left dropping out one by one, low and scratchy in the cooler nights. Finally a hard frost comes in and takes what’s left out.

Someone mentioned spring peepers. A favorite of mine too. The last time I’ve heard them was on White Mt NH in June, high/cold enough up they were still peeping, maybe 2003.

If I were a richer man retired I would travel up to the NE in March just to hear them again.

We get some every year. In this region the big hatch occurs every 17 years: 1953, 1970, 1987, 2004, 2021 in my lifetime. I was still working in 2004, and some of the locations I covered on the night shift were in suburban Northern Virginia where there are a lot of mature trees. There seemed to be billions at each place. One of our buildings had the entire back wall covered with them, attracted by the bright lighting. Out in front of another location on the Arlington County/Alexandria line, Route 7 was slippery with crushed ones.

While turkey hunting in 21, I saw deer scarfing them up in a meadow. Just about everything eats ‘em. Every so often a bird will fly by with one in its beak. Those REALLY make a racket!

I was reading this article and found this interesting. They can screw up the acorn production cycle on oak trees.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-double-brood-of-periodical-cicadas-will-emerge-in-2024/

And female cicadas also damage trees directly by slicing into twigs to lay their eggs. Although these two types of damage rarely kill trees, the effect is enough to reset the clocks of trees such as oaks, which typically undergo “mast years” in which they produce large batches of acorns every few years in synchrony. After accumulating damage during a cicada emergence, these trees produce lean harvests for two autumns in a row and then a feastlike burst of nuts two-and-a-half years after a cicada emergence, Lill says.