Six amazing things city dwellers miss out on
Nice article. I guess I’m fortunate - I live in a city, but just outside the city limits in a neighborhood where my half-acre yard is the smallest one around. Our neighbor across the street has 4 acres; most of the others are an acre or two.
Baton Rouge is also very very green - there are trees everywhere, it’s one of the greenest towns of this size I’ve seen.
One of the things mentioned in this article is one of the things I enjoy most about summers where I live - the sound of cicadas. I don’t see them that often, but boy, do they ever make themselves heard! At dusk in the summertime, when I go out to take a walk, the sound of the cicadas can be deafening - truly, so loud that it drowns out all other sounds of traffic, kids playing, whatever else is going on. It’s amazingly loud, and I’ve loved the sound since I was a kid, sitting on the swing in my backyard at sunset, just listening.
Sounds of nature
During the summer months, suburbanites often hear these singing insects before they see them. With their spirited acoustics, cicadas are hard to miss.
The inch-long bug’s distinctive buzzing, humming, and clicking are produced by males at astounding volumes. (Some of the loudest cicada songs reach 120 decibels, which translates to a pretty loud mating, courting, or distress call.)
Seemingly pervasive in some climates, a cicada’s adult live is brief. Juveniles, or nymphs, live underground most of their lives and emerge for two to six weeks in the heat of the summer.
But they don’t tread lightly. Tens of thousands have been known to blanket an acre of land in Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Though there are thousands of species, the most common species emerge every 13 or 17 years. So if you missed the great cicada concerts of 2004, get ready for 2011.