Specialization is for Insects

Liz’s Garden

Cicadas

Liz has been engaged in a big garden project for the past month or so. She widened and shortened her garden and has laid out two knot gardens. There is space (and plans) for a third knot garden as well, and she plans to grow fruit trees and train them into an espalier shape.

One of the reasons Liz has delayed planting the fruit trees is that we have been visited by thousands of 17 Year Cicadas. We get normal cicadas every year, of course, but this year is crazy. They are all over the place.

It’s amazing how stupid and uncoordinated they are. If there weren’t so many of them, I’m sure none of them would survive. They have wings, but I’ve never seen one fly for more than about 15 feet, and I’ve never seen one gain altitude. I guess it’s more important for their wings to make loud mating calls than it is for them to fly well. Once they mate & lay eggs, their eggs will hatch & the cicada larva will burrow into the ground to hang out until 2024.

One down side to the cicadas is they have attracted a large number of seagulls. They live near Lake Michigan, so maybe I should be calling them “lakegulls”. We hardly ever see seagulls in Homewood, but in the past few days I’ve seen hundreds of them. And they are eating well.

I helped put out a train fire early last Saturday morning. The engine was blowing fire out of it’s exhaust stack. The engineer had shut everything down, but the engine continued to run because the fuel injectors had jammed open. (This is called “dieseling” . A diesel engine doesn’t need electricity to keep running — as long as there is a supply of fuel and oxygen, the engine will keep going.) The engineer said this is a fairly common occurrence.

We extinguished the fire with foam. It took surprisingly little foam to put the fire out. Once the fire was out, the engine shut down. We turned the engine back over to the train engineer and went back to our station.

The Crow by Fiona Moran

My old friend the crow
The farmer’s foe
He eats the beans and the barley they sow
why he does this I just don’t know.
It’s a pity he’s naughty,
My old pal the crow