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? …

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 sometimes just record their call, and use it to identify it, but it definitely is easier when you can just take a photo of them :)

[image] redadmiral98: I’m interested in how to attract them as to better be able to document them, a la light trapping for moth surveys. 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 gen…

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 th…

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…

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 appare…

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. [Resized_20230805_121036]

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 grea…

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, t…

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 recentl…

How to attract cicadas?

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How to attract cicadas?

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