The quintessential sound of summer

There are few other sounds worth bothering with, quite frankly, except perhaps that of The Boss’s knife and fork coming to rest on his plate. For an alert dog, that raises the possibility of a left-over, particularly this time of year when he and the Missus eat outside.

Being bred for hunting and retrieving, as I am, I am also obliged to listen out for the meow of a wood duck landing on the pool – The Boss doesn’t approve of the mess they leave – or a neighbouring dog barking, or a fox yelping or the squeal of a hare but they all come a poor second to any sound signalling the possibility of food.

So I had trouble paying attention the other day when he was rattling on about the different sounds of the bush during the seasons.

He thinks the quintessential sound of summer is the song of the cicadas, if you can call their ear-splitting siren call a song.

But he tells me this love song from the male in search of a female has fascinated people for thousands of years and the cicada’s “sweet song” appears in the poetry and literature of the ancient Greeks and Chinese.

When he was a young bloke and hiking around the Greek island of Kerkira, or Corfu, The Boss recalls bumping into an old Greek farmer and striking up a conversation of sorts, despite the Boss’s very rudimentary Greek.

“Tzitziki, tzitziki,” the old man said, spreading his hands and looking up to indicate the sounds filling the valley. There was no mistaking the Greek word for cicada and The Boss reckons it’s a much better word for the hallowed insect anyway.

There’s more than 3200 species of cicada officially described around the world and a lot more besides.

Their life begins as one of up to 400 eggs laid by a female on a twig, a leaf or the bark of a tree. The nymph cicada hatches, falls to the ground and tunnels into the dirt to spend up to five years – most of its life – in the soil.

There is one species unique to the US that lives underground for up to 17 years before emerging.

Eventually the nymph leaves the soil to moult; the back of the nymph’s exoskeleton splits and the adult cicada pushes its way out.

These cicada shells – often all we ever see of a cicada’s life cycle – are partly why the ancients associated cicadas with immortality and resurrection, as well as spiritual ecstasy for their song. As an adult, a cicada will eat, sing, mate and die, all in a few weeks.

The song is created by a thin membrane on the male called the tymbal, which works a bit like a drum. These membranes vibrate rapidly through muscle action, which makes a clicking sound that’s amplified by their hollow abdomen.

The effect can be deafening: some cicada species, such as the greengrocer cicada (Cyclochila australasiae) found along the coast of south-east Australia, can reach 120 decibels, just short of the 130 decibel level thought to damage hearing.

The Boss recalls trying to explain to the old Greek gentleman how he’d been fishing with a mate on the West Buffalo a year or two earlier – in the days before cheap ear plugs – and the song of the cicadas in the dense bush was so loud they’d had to cut up a wet handkerchief to stuff in their ears.

Give me a descending dog bowl under load, any day. Woof!