Episode 68: Walker’s Cicada – Voice of the Wild

This is Brodie with Illinois Extension and I’m here with a new “voice of the wild”

Calling loudly from the cottonwoods and willows of creek sides and swamps, this large cicada is active from July all the way to October. It is a colorful insect, with black patterning and spots of ochre against a backdrop of lime green or straw yellow. This is walker’s annual cicada.

Apart from the color, you can tell walker’s cicada from most of the other common annual cicadas by their size; they’re a member of the megatibicen genus, and appropriate to that name, they’re larger than most of the common cicadas in the Eastern US. but, As usual, the male’s song is the most practical way to identify them; that song is very loud and strongly but slowly pulsed, slow enough, in fact, that you can count the individual pulses. Here’s walker’s annual cicada again.

Thank you to the Macaulay library at the Cornell lab for today’s sound. Learn more about voice of the wild at go.illinois.edu/VOW