Honey-Glazed Cicadas

Hah! Now I’ve got your attention! I bet you were thinking this was going to be a recipe!

Nope—this one fits into the category of “natural history notes.” (Aren’t you relieved?)




I took this picture about a week ago; I was in Columbia for an appointment, then picked up lunch and met Sue at Stephens. We had our sandwiches sitting on the wall next to the lovely Eero Saarinen–designed Firestone-Baars Chapel, in the shade of some pines.

Oh! Did I mention that we got me a new camera? Well, it’s used. Off of eBay. It’s another Nikon Coolpix 4500, just like the old one. A dinosaur compared to newer models, but let me assure you, being able to swivel the camera body makes up for its age. (Especially when one is attempting to photograph a spider hanging hip-high in her web—from below.)

Luckily I had the camera with me that day, because this was a remarkable sight. There were several cicada molts attached to the trees. (I guess a plenitude of cicada nymphs in an area is one measure of how undisturbed and healthy a plot of land is.)

And these pine trees were weeping sap, as they do, from places where they’d been trimmed.

So this isn’t really honey—it’s pine sap.

But it looks like honey, and it’s just as sticky!

Fortunately, the adult cicadas got clear of the sap before it oozed upon their spent exoskeletons. I mean, there are enough dangers out there for the adult cicadas; they don't need any pine sap to be threatening them, too.

Ah, but that’s for another post . . . stay tuned.

Trusty Nikon Coolpix 4500: RIP

Hi, folks--today I'm not going to "review" anything; instead, I'm giving you a little status update on how things are going "behind the scenes" here. It's about the camera.

It's kaput. My trusty, easy, point-and-shoot Nikon Coolpix 4500 is out of commission. The zoom button doesn't work--you press it down, and nothing happens; it doesn't even spring back into place.

It is an old camera, but a very good one for a "point and shoot"; Sue started letting me use it when she got her nice digital SLR, which by now she's replaced with a newer SLR.

And it was having other problems; the sensor was getting old. I don't know if you noticed, but there were more than a few "dead pixels" creeping in there, and the pictures were having more and more "noise," especially when the lighting was dark. Sue showed me how to compensate somewhat, by bumping the resolution to its highest level.

Oh, but without the zoom, it's almost impossible to get the thing to find its focus, especially when taking closeup pictures. And closeups were one of the biggest strengths of that camera.

Especially for pictures of food!

(A sloppy joe from Kaitlyn's graduation party last summer!)

(Meringue atop one of the kuchens I've made, using Grandma's recipe.)

(Some kind of mushroom fly atop a cluster of honey mushrooms in our yard last summer.)

(When we dig in our gardens, we often discover historic marbles and stuff.)

The swivel feature is more than just a convenience that saved me from having to lie on the ground or get dirt on my chin; sometimes, you really don't want to have your face anywhere near the subject!

(Found on the Lake Erie beach at Huron, Ohio, last summer.)

(July 5, 2009, found on the sidewalk of downtown Jeff City; a cookie--I think.)

At this point, I'm mainly relying on Sue for pictures; she took all of the Jacob's Cave ones in the last post. And we're hunting on eBay to see what kind of replacement I can get inexpensively. Meanwhile--you might have to tolerate a few posts without pictures. Sorry, but that's how it goes, I guess.

Another One of My Little Friends

Okay, I really don't want to turn this into a "photo blog," but I can't resist sharing these pictures with you. Plus a little background.

See, when I was a little girl, I liked bugs (though spiders did give me the creeps). The lady across the street knew that I liked to let June bugs clamber around on my hands and stuff, so it got to the point where whenever she found a garter snake or a big bug or something while she was out gardening, she would call me over: "Hey, come over here, Julie, I've found another one of your little friends." And I would trot right over to see what she had: Ooooooohhh!

So I thought of Mrs. Crawford last night when I discovered this cute little jumping spider exploring the ceiling inside our front dormer window. I suspect this spider came in on a plant we had brought in for the winter. Or maybe she crept into the house through one of our drafty windows. I dunno.

I'll tell you more about how I came to appreciate spiders, in particular, despite my ingrained fear of them, some other time.

But for now, realize that I have a special appreciation for jumping spiders. I decided they're just cute: They're fuzzy like little teddy bears. They wear goggles--or are they headlights? They're chunky and armored, little all-terrain vehicles, like the toy model tanks my brother had growing up. When they're scared, they have a habit of covering their mouths (chelicerae) with their hands (pedipalps).

When they walk, I think "tic-tic-tic-tic-tic . . ." When they rear their heads up to look around, I imagine them making a sound like "hmmm--????" They are curious creatures, and they inspire curiosity in me as well.

Of course I wasn't going to squash her. I felt sorry for her: She was probably getting worried about being in a place so devoid of potential food items. I bet she hadn't eaten all day. So I grabbed the plastic cover from my spindle of CDs and a small stack of manuscript pages, trapped her gently, and escorted her outside. Oh, and I brought my camera along, too.

My camera, by the way, is the whole reason any of these photos might be decent--it's a Nikon Coolpix E4500. Autofocus; 28mm. To get these, I put it on the "flower setting" and zoomed in or out. I simply take a whole lot of pictures, hoping a few will "come out." And that's the extent of my photography skills, pretty much.

So: I think this is a female Platycryptus undatus. According to Wikipedia, the genus name needs to be changed, since it's already been used for a wasp genus (and genus names can't be reused for different genera--it's the law). My handy (and simplified) Golden Nature Guide Spiders and Their Kin (1968) lists it as Metacyrba undata, which, I presume, is an outdated synonym.

Apparently these little hunters like to live around and under the bark of trees, which makes a lot of sense, given their coloration and patterns.

Here's a view of her driver's side:

And here's a picture of her kind of reared up. She was surprisingly bright orange on her undercarriage. When she struck this pose (and she did it often, once I'd dumped her out on our front walkway), it was like she was sniffing the breeze, or periscoping with her eight eyes, "prairie-dogging," trying to get her bearings as an extraordinarily short-statured being in an immense and unknown, unpredictable world.