Cicada Madness in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park

A walk in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park yesterday coincided with one of those natural events that impress me very much – a full-on Cicada concert. Thousands of Cicadas were buzzing continuously in perfect sync. There must have been several different species with several distinct 'melodies', but I know too little about insects and Wikipedia doesn't provide much info either. (It's still well worth reading about the Cicada species in general.) I recorded several minutes of audio, but the quality of these recordings is pretty bad. Still I decided to post a short part of them, just to give at least some vague idea about this amazing experience.

Well... I may be completely wrong, but these sounds give me an idea what the Didgeridoo sounds like. For me, it's at least partially based on those wild Cicada audio vibrations.

I'm not equipped for insect photos either. The images below were taken with my 300mm lens, which meant I had to step a meter and a half away to be able to focus the bugs....
I'm not too sure about the IDs, so if you think there's something wrong with them being labeled as Redeye Cicada (Psaltoda moerens), please let me know either in comments or in an email. Thanks!

Cicadas in Ku-ring-gai Chase NP, NSW

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Currawong Song

As I have mentioned in a previous post there are many young Currawongs around. They are playful, they seek each other's company and they organize fantastic concerts nearly every afternoon. Some days it's far away from my window, but on several occasions it took place in the nearby tree. I wanted to share their beautiful song with the visitors of this blog, esp. the ones who live overseas.

I wish I had a microphone that suited outdoor recording better. This one is good for PC-to-PC calls, but doesn't handle well even the weakest breeze. It's not easy to find where to upload an mp3 file these days, so notorious they have become. The only way round I could think of was to use a Flash container. It took some time to build it, but I can use it in the future if I record more sounds. Multimedia is so much fun!

The length of the recording is about 70 seconds and the file size is ~700k. Rainbow Lorikeets can be heard in the bg too. Enjoy!

Pied Currawongs, Sydney

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