Today while biking around Barton Hills we heard some loud noises which we
would have thought were frogs except there were no ponds around.  Jim guessed
cicadas.  I thought it was too early in the year, until we started to see them
crawling around on the road and the weeds.  They are almost an inch long,
gold, and cannot fly very far.  I never noticed them before.  Do they really
emerge only once every 17 years?  Jim thinks he saw a large number of them
in 1972.  I hear some insect at night later in the summer - is that crickets?
We also saw a brown duck-sized bird with a long beak, that dived under for
quite a while - loon?  And two small dark blue shiny birds by the river.  
And some yellow flag (iris) the same exact shade as two nearby yellow plastic
bags.  
There is a newly paved trail along the south side of the river going west from
the Argo Park Dam (now also bikable, with ramps) to Bandemer Park, where you
can cross under the highway and over the bridge, and then turn right onto the
not-so-new boardwalk, which takes you past a small waterfall to unpaved and
carless (today) Longshore Drive) thence back to the dam.

5 responses total.

Apparently this year's cicada generation is a really big one - there have been
news stories about it.  Cicadas do come out every 17 years, and so there are
17 different years of cicadas in the ground.

There are also large batches of 13 year cicadas. There is an evolutionary
reason why they are both prime numbers, which I saw in an article but
can't remember the reason. 

Bzzttt!! Mr. scott.
Please choose another category.

klg, are you actually accusing me of being wrong?  

Have your meds gotten mixed up or something?

Tonight we saw the first firefly.  I recall them usually becoming common in
August.  

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