Cicada season

What's the buzz? The morning paper reports on that sound we've been hearing: "It's a bug opera emanating from trees and bushes pretty much anywhere in the Coachella Valley, this noise that sounds like the hum of a florescent light bulb magnified by a thousand. Longtime desert residents and transplants from the Midwest or South recognize the call of the male Apache cicada, an insect that spends most of its life feeding on plant roots underground, before emerging one summer to mate, then die. The dusky gray cicadas have outsize eyes, large veined transparent wings and can be up to 2 inches in length. That buzzing is the mating call of the male cicada, and natural selection works against people who just want the bugs to shut up. Cicada populations and noise levels can vary widely between neighborhoods, and often increase in newly developed areas once the landscaping is mature enough to offer a good food source for the cicada larvae. The males roost in bushes and trees, and if they have better luck or smarts they pick one that's not blocked by a building, so their voice travels even farther. After they mate, the female lays the eggs on a branch, and they hatch a few days later, with the larvae dropping to the dirt below and tunneling in to live among the plant roots. Some cicada species can take 13 to 17 years to resurface, but the desert's Apache cicadas do in about three to six years, depending on how many tree roots there are to feed on. The larvae rarely do enough damage to kill a tree, so the mating call is the only trait that could make them qualify as a pest. And the buzzing can be surprisingly easy to stop, at least temporarily. If you disturb them, they stop right away." Miss Penny Lane says: She doesn't mind a cicada concert in her yard. Sometimes she even signs along with them.