Favoritos de adriennefriend

West DuPage Woods: warming quickly to a fairly hot afternoon. Intense choruses of cassinii with a background of septendecim (most notable in forest areas with mature trees). Choruses peaked at 101.8 dB at the prairie margins. A fair number of cassinii had some degree of orange on the sternite margins; no decula were heard, but lots of cassinii ticking and various phases of courtship calls.

A poor connection between my shotgun mic and phone disrupted a few of the recordings.

This observation is for the Blue Jay.
A bird (juvenile grackle?) hit the front window. A few minutes later, a Blue Jay had arrived and was busy plucking the feathers off the back of the bird. After plucking most of the feathers away, it pecked through the back (last photo) and made several trips back and forth to carry away meat. Later it apparently managed to flip the bird over and pecked through the abdomen under the rib cage, leaving a large hole in the abdomen. It removed the intestines but ate most of the other organs. The rest of the dead bird then disappeared overnight.

It is either this Magicicada cassinii or Magicicada tredecassini. Given location and also the sound recordings themselves, I think this is M. cassinii. There was, from what I could tell, only one individual. I was able to see it fly a couple of times, just within the same tree canopy. I am presuming that it is a hitchhiker. It is in an urban parking lot and the habitat is quite bad. It is hanging out in a European elm of some kind (I would probably call it Ulmus glabra) and there are only two trees in the whole parking lot. I obscure my locations all the time, but if you are a cicada researcher and want the exact coordinates, please DM me!