A Cicada Symphony, Review of The Songs of Insects, by Lang Elliott and Wil Hershberger. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.) By Tom Murphy
You’ve heard of songbirds, of course, but why not song bugs? A book on harmonious insects makes a case for the beautiful tune of the katydid.
More than twenty years ago, when we lived just north of Pittsburgh,
our young daughter Emily and I watched a cicada, which, as a clunky
brown bug, had attached itself to the foundation below the kitchen
window. Its back split open and, as Emily looked intently, a fantastic,
oversized, big-eyed, dark-bodied, gossamer-winged insect slowly
extracted itself from its shell.
When I read about the seventeen-year cicada in Elliott and Hershberger’s
The Songs of Insects, I wondered if that cicada was one of them.
The book maps the twelve known broods and Brood VIII, centered
on Pittsburgh, appeared in 1985. It takes years for cicadas to
mature, and periodical cicadas in a region mature at the same
time once every seventeen or thirteen years and live for a few
weeks.
So I called Emily, who is now a National Park ranger in Massachusetts.
She remembered the cicada right away.
“Do you think it could have been a seventeen-year cicada?”
I asked.
“No,” she said immediately, “it had green eyes
not red ones so it was just a regular cicada.” I was impressed
that she knew that; I did only because I’d just read it.
It’s amazing what your children know. “Besides,”
she went on, “if it had been seventeen-year cicadas, we
would not have seen just one. Remember when we had them in Bucks
County? There were empty skins and cicadas everywhere.”
Based on Elliott and Hershberger, that was probably Brood X. “And
the noise,” she went on. “What a racket they made!”
Elliot and Hershberger talk about cicadas because, along with
crickets, katydids, and grasshoppers, they sing. The big, richly
colored photographs in this book make the intricate complexity
of these insects clear. Some are actually quite beautiful. Each
of the seventy-five examples is described in both words and pictures,
including a sonogram (which graphs the insect’s sound),
range maps, and actual sounds on the accompanying CD. The authors
also include general sections explaining insect song and how to
find and perhaps collect the insects.
During the phone call, Emily lamented that, living in the middle
of tightly-packed Salem, she missed the insect sounds of late-summer
nights. I told her that even here in Tioga County, my nights are
quieter. Elliot and Hershberger, both middle-aged themselves,
note that the gradual hearing loss, at the top of the frequency
range, that comes with age and loud noises prevents many of us
from hearing some insects. They used a pricey device to step some
of the songs down into their range.
A healthy young person can hear about nine octaves worth of sounds,
they note, beginning at 30 Hz (hertz, a measure of the number
of cycles per second) and ending at 20,000 Hz. Most insects sing
in the upper two octaves (4,000 to 20,000 Hz), but many of us
by age fifty can hear only to 10,000 Hz, and by sixty, only 5,000
Hz. The human voice is generally below 5,000 Hz. Most of the insects
on the CD are in the lower ranges, but when I played the track
for the Saltmarsh Meadow Katydid, whose dominant frequency is
18,000 Hz, I heard nothing. This book may inspire young people
to get outside and hear some of these songs, especially when they
realize that they perceive a few things in nature that their elders
cannot. But the real treat in this book for young and old is the
power of making sense of the chorus of insect noises that surround
us in late summer. The Songs of Insects is in the Green Free Library’s
collection.
Tom Murphy teaches nature writing at Mansfield University. You
can contact him at readingnature@mountainhomemag.com. |
