If you notice I didn’t make a Michigan t-shirt. Here’s why: no periodical cicadas in Michigan this year
Don’t worry too much — Michigan will get the plain old, sly, elusive, camo-colored Tibicens in the summer time.
BTW, we did get our first Wisconsin report this weekend. I’m happy about that.
As one of the “overeager graduate students” mentioned in that article, I certainly agree with your skepticism about the SW Michigian records. We’ve been looking forward to seeing whether that weird “tail” of country dots would pan out or not. There used to be a 13-year brood named “XXI” that had a similarly strange distribution that perfectly followed the border of two of the southern states, and eventually it was shown to be mistaken records of other cicadas or stragglers. I have always guessed, based on the distributions of habitats, that Brood XIII follows along the southern edge of Lake Michigan but ends somewhere before that extension into SW MI, but I guess I figured there would be a few populations right by the lake in Michigan at least (I forget which county that is). But maybe there won’t even be any populations along the lake in that state — now I’m even wondering about some of the Indiana populations. We’ll know soon enough.
I couldn’t resist writing back to the reporter to point out that if we had tried to prove and correct all of the errors in those maps (which took 200 years to assemble) before putting them on the web, we’d still be in graduate school today! :-)
Comment by Dave Marshall — May 27, 2007 @ 6:43 am
Cicada batches have come up in our yard every morning since the 23rd and the white ones are so cute I have picked up many of those. I watched the wings dry on a few. This morning I walk over to our big tree and there were so many in the tree and on the ground that they were all in their different stages. Some were nymths that came from the ground and some were slowly coming out of the shell and some were sticking out of the shell and some were waiting for their wings to dry and some were black. I took a bunch of pictures to show family and friends but I dont have a digital. Ill buy a digial in the next week or so. Normally i am not a bug person but once you touch one its not so bad. They know there wings have to dry and so if you put one in the grass they grab onto the grass and climb up to the top and just sit there until the wings are dry. They have to dry properly so that they can fly. I think that is so cute. Sheri Tuskey from Westmont, Illinois
Comment by Sheri Tuskey — May 27, 2007 @ 1:28 pm
Cicadas seen on May 26 in Lake Geneva, Wi. backyard. very interesting phenomenon. Seem to gravitate towards daffodil leaves. Now it’s the 28th and there are tons of them. I feel lucky to have observed this because I never have before.
Comment by linda foust — May 28, 2007 @ 8:16 am