Posting from east-central Illinois here. Are there any good ways to attract cicadas? They’re my favorite insects, and I’m also trying to catalog them for some Park District property masterlists. Currently practicing on differentiating their calls, but is there any way to draw them in for visual ID?
I know they can come to light setups and light traps, but I’ve only ever had one show up to that method so far. Any other random ways to attract them? (Live) traps, baiting (doubtful on that one given their ecology, but I don’t know for certain), vibrations, sound, etc?
I’ve been wondering what makes it so attractive to them. Maybe because it’s black and heats up in the afternoon sun, holding extra warmth throughout the night?
And they’re not the only ones attracted to it… I guess it’s a pretty good tree bark mimic.
We have plenty of cicadas at the properties I’m interested in; their calls are a near constant from July through September. We may even have Megatibicen at a restored prairie/woodland. I’m interested in how to attract them as to better be able to document them, a la light trapping for moth surveys.
Intriguing! Now that you mention it, I found a cicada shell on a rain barrel at a friend of a friend’s earlier this season. I wonder if, as you mentioned, its retaining heat. Might just have to get one!
i would think that for animals that are known to be as noisy as they are, that using that noise would be the key to attracting cicadas. however, cicadas generally seem to be quite cautious creatures, and attracting them to a general location does not mean that they will be easy to find among leaves and branches, and just as oftentimes nowadays, folks frown on attracting birds by pishing, it may not be best practice to attract cicadas by sound either.
if you have the budget for an acoustic camera, i think something like that would be the best way to locate cicadas in the environment (other than looking for them as then emerge from the base of their favorite trees).
I’ve been surprised about how seemingly unfussy the most common local cicada is (Cicada barbara). Olive groves are full of them, as are the local streams edges filled with exotic Eucalypts, honey locusts, and other invasives.
Granted they could just be climbing these trees to moult and call, but there really is very little native vegetation in these locations.
I’d like to know if this is possible. Right now I think I’d need a fire truck ladder to get pictures of the annual species that are common around here. They scream all summer in the Douglas Fir trees in my yard, but I never see them. I’m not even sure what part of the tree I should be looking at for the ones around here, but Douglas Firs are very tall and they sound quite high up.
I don’t know if they ever come down once they’ve ascended, but if there’s a way to attract them down (that isn’t harmful to them overall) that would be great to know! I have only seen a teneral once in my yard even though I know all the screaming adults had to have come from somewhere, haha. I think they are Okanagana. I’m not sure where they would usually choose to molt. It was on a cage I had around my strawberries to protect them from birds.
I visited Chicago just a little too late to catch the periodical cicadas, but was told by my FiL that they were just everywhere at eye level.
A few years ago I was trying to catch an Okanagana species to help with a research project, that genus is apparently usually perched low in bushes but the species I was targetting evidently was not and were always way up in trees like the Neotibicen I’m more familiar with. Also Neotibicen are apparently attracted to lights at night while Okanagana aren’t. I spent a bunch of time researching how to catch cicadas, including going down a rabbit trail of trying to find every video on Youtube of people catching cicadas around the world. I made a playlist of those videos here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLimWNWljMrtcGiCBhVdnTWL3btOR6JuK4&si=w2ZxF-47YFnn19o-
The most effective strategy seems to be getting a long extendable circus tent pole, and sticking something sticky like gum or a sticky rubber plastic toy at the end of the pole. Then you can “just” touch the end of the pole to the cicada way up in the tree and lower it down. I never ended up trying this, I suspect I’d end up aiming poorly and scaring most of them away.
One thing that interested me was seeing that in Japan there are a lot more cicada species than here, and many of them will sing from the trunks of trees below head height, making them much easier and more fun to catch. As a result there’s more of a tradition of young children going around catching cicadas, which I imagine partly inspired Japanese bug-catching video games like Animal Crossing and Pokemon.
A few years ago, I had enclosed my front porch with some tarps while I was building a cabinet. One morning I went out and one was just hanging out on the tarp.
Since mine are up in tall trees, they must not be Okanagana, then! I’ve never even been able to locate where they are yelling from so I won’t be able to poke them with a sticky stick, unfortunately. I need to find out what some good budget recording equipment is for bug and bird song. This is a great playlist!
The iNat app has a recording function that will work sufficiently for birds and cicadas provided you don’t have a ton of background noise. The Merlin app is also optimized for getting the best recording quality out of phones. If I’m beside a road I might just record until I hit a break in traffic, then move the audio file to my computer and crop out the good section in Audacity.
For sure, I’ve played callback of native cicadas before with not much success, and my ear can’t seem to remember which call is which or differentiate when dozens are singing at once! Practice makes perfect though. And definitely not easy to find them in the brush; there’s been multiple times recently I’ve spooked cicadas brushing by some foliage.
An acoustic camera might be of interest, I’ll look into it. Thank you!
For sure; I’ve recorded a few calls and am looking to upload them soon. Using Merlin is a great idea! (now if only someone could create a Merlin for identifying insect calls haha)
Periodical emergence was definitely “easy mode” for finding cicadas haha. They were everywhere at the spots I looked for them (southern Chicago suburbs, Charleston), and they’re certainly less wary than the annual cicadas.
Recently eBird has started allowing non-bird recordings in the checklist comments, so maybe in a few years they’ll have enough recordings to start training Merlin on them (they also have an iNat shoutout there!):
On the other hand if iNat figures out how to handle spectrograms and is able to train on them specifically, there might be a better collection of audio here to train on…
just keep in mind that even if you don’t have the budget to buy one – they are quite expensive – you might still be able to rent one. and if there’s a physical rental location nearby, you might be able to test them out and get some tips before committing.
It is wild that something so obnoxious should be so shy. They often even go quiet as I ride past on my bicycle or walk under the tree that they are in.
