The sound of summer

This isn’t a quiet time in the garden… as well as the road working machinery down the hill on the main road there are the birds – hoopoes hooping, golden orioles calling (to me their call sounds as though they’re saying ‘get real!’ but I’m not sure others hear it this way), and the swooping of swifts, martins and swallows – and there are the crickets, but the real sign that summer is here is when we begin to hear the cicadas.  Cicadas are rather unattractive-looking insects who make their chattering sound in trees when the temperature rises above 25 degrees C.  Because they are confined to the south they’ve become a symbol of the Midi and a great way of raising money from tourists by selling them ‘realistic’ models in glazed terracotta so that they can take the sound home with them.

When I searched for sound recordings of cicadas on the Internet last year I could find only recordings from other parts of the world and they sounded different from our Mediterranean ones.  So, here is my recording of the cicadas in our neighbour’s almond tree this morning.  It was a bit windy, so the sound quality is not perfect, but I think you’ll hear what our garden sounded like this morning.