Cicadas everywhere

The cicadas have emerged.

The noise that they make is amazing -- they are so loud that I can't
hear my watch beep to tell me to collect data. They have been on every
tree, Flying randomly, ricocheting off of the tree trunk, us, each
other. One of their more pleasant aspects is that they pee when they
take off, so at any given moment if you kick up a bunch of cicadas you
are rewarded with a lovely bug misting. Just make sure you keep your
lips closed.

The upside is that everything is eating them. The birds, lemurs, and
people. The crested drongos snatch the little beasts off of trunks or
in mid-flight then make off with the angry cicada. It's great to hear
the enraged cicada, buzzing for its life gradually get softer as the
drongo flies away to land on a branch and eviscerate it. On the whole,
the lemurs are pretty bad at catching cicadas. The really good ones
watch a cicada fly off and land and then POUNCE on it. The bad ones
would just grab impotently at flying bugs and come up empty handed.
Some groups are better at catching them than others, and the groups
that live in the center of the reserve (prime cicada territory from
what I can tell) are the best at it.

The people may be the most entertaining to watch catch cicadas. They
started in small groups of 3-4 people, spearing the cicadas (one
advantage of always carrying a spear), pulling off their wings, and
dropping them into a bucket. When the cicadas finally emerged in huge
numbers groups of almost 15 people were wandering the forest, hunting
for this noisy, pork-rind tasting delicacy. Most of the people weren't
sure about what to do when they saw us in the forest -- do they run or
do they carry on with their business all nonchalant-like. Since I'm
pretty sure they aren't supposed to be hunting anything in the
reserve, the smaller groups ran away, but the bigger groups of teenage
boys just seemed to be too cool for school and would wander on by,
check out what we were doing, spear another cicada and move along.