About Cicadas
The sound of a North Louisiana summer is the cicada. Not one of them, all of them at once, from every tree in every direction, at a volume that makes outdoor conversation genuinely difficult in peak months. People who grew up in North Louisiana process this as silence, or at least as background, in the way that people who grow up near the ocean stop hearing the ocean. People who move to North Louisiana from quieter climates have a period of adjustment that ranges from a week to never, depending on their relationship with loud.
Cicadas are not locusts. This needs to be said because the confusion is everywhere and it is wrong in a specific direction: locusts are grasshoppers, and periodical locust swarms are a different insect in a different order doing a different ecological thing for different reasons in different parts of the world. The cicadas in the oak tree are Hemiptera. The locusts of biblical plague are Orthoptera. North Louisiana carries neither the biblical plague nor the connection between them. It carries cicadas, which are remarkable enough without the comparison.
What Cicadas Are
Cicadas are large insects in the order Hemiptera, the true bugs, making them more closely related to aphids and stink bugs than to grasshoppers or beetles. The adults are the ones everyone has a relationship with: stout, broad-headed, with large compound eyes, transparent or colored wings held tent-like over the body, and the ability to produce sound at volumes that register on noise ordinance charts in municipalities that have tried to address this.
Males produce the sound using a pair of ribbed membranes on the abdomen that buckle and pop rapidly when muscles flex them. The clicking of individual membrane bucklings is too fast to hear as separate events. The clicking of individual tymbal buckling is too fast to hear as separate events. The aggregate is the sound: a continuous, wavering, penetrating tone that in chorus with hundreds of other males becomes the wall of sound North Louisiana calls summer.
Females are silent. They are listening. The male's call is species-specific, and the female can identify them own species in a chorus containing multiple species singing simultaneously. The discrimination is exact. They are not confused by the noise. The male calling from the wrong species might as well not be calling.
What North Louisiana Has
North Louisiana's cicadas include annual species, species that emerge every year because overlapping broods cycle through on varying schedules, and periodical cicadas, species that spend 13 or 17 years underground as nymphs before emerging in synchrony. Both types occur in North Louisiana.
The annual cicadas are the ones producing the summer soundtrack. Several species contribute to the multi-layered sound that North Louisiana residents experience from June through September, each with a different call, a different peak timing, and a different preferred tree. The green-winged cicada and the Resh cicada are two of the more distinctive annual cicada species in North Louisiana. Both get their own articles because both are worth knowing by name.
The 13-year periodical cicada, Magicicada tredecim and related species, carries broods that include populations within North Louisiana. When a 13-year brood emerges in North Louisiana, the emergence is impossible to miss and impossible to overstate. Millions of individuals in a few weeks, calling at densities that change the acoustic character of the landscape. North Louisiana summers are already loud. A 13-year emergence makes the regular summer sound quiet by comparison, which is not a sentence most North Louisiana residents expect to read.
Millions of individuals appearing simultaneously over a period of days, calling at densities that create a physical pressure to the sound, breeding, laying eggs, and dying within weeks. The emergence happens and then it is over for another 13 years. Residents who are present for a North Louisiana 13-year emergence and do not know what they are seeing are having an experience that confuses them significantly.
The Life Underground
The majority of a cicada's life happens underground and is invisible to anyone above it. An annual cicada that spends two to five years underground as a nymph feeding on root fluids from the trees above is conducting its entire larval existence in a place that North Louisiana residents do not think about and cannot observe. The nymph moves through the soil, molts through several growth stages, and eventually constructs an exit tunnel when the combination of soil temperature and moisture, and probably other cues not yet fully understood, signals that it is time.
The emergence is the moment of contact between the underground life and the surface world. The nymph exits the soil, climbs whatever vertical surface is nearest, and undergoes its final molt from nymph to adult. The process takes thirty minutes to several hours.
The nymph that was underground for years is not in a hurry about the last hour. The shed exoskeleton, the exuvia, clings to the tree bark or fence post or outdoor furniture where the molt happened. The adult inflates its wings, waits for the new exoskeleton to harden, and joins the calling chorus or, if female, begins evaluating the callers.
The exuvia is the most commonly encountered physical evidence of cicada biology in North Louisiana. The brown, hollow, articulated shell clinging to the bark of an oak tree in June is the former skin of a cicada that was underground for years and surfaced to become the noise in the canopy.
Peeling it off and looking at it closely is an extremely worthwhile thirty seconds. It has the exact shape of the animal that was in it, down to the leg joints and the developing wing pads, and it contains nothing, which is genuinely impressive given how much it looks like something. The cicada that was in it is in the canopy right now, calling. The shell it left behind will outlast it by months.
The Trees
Cicadas in North Louisiana use trees in different ways depending on species. The nymphs feed on root fluids from trees and woody shrubs. The adults call from tree canopies and lay eggs in tree twigs by cutting slits in the bark and depositing eggs in the wound.
The egg-laying wound causes the twig tip to die and fall, a phenomenon called flagging. A lawn scattered with small twig tips with brown dead leaves attached, in July, means female cicadas used those trees. The trees tolerate it. They tolerated it for as long as trees and cicadas have shared North Louisiana, which is longer than the houses below them. The twig tips on the lawn are evidence of a successful interaction between two organisms that worked it out for millions of years.
The Noise Level
The call of a North Louisiana cicada chorus at peak summer intensity measures 90 to 100 decibels at close range. Extended exposure at those levels causes hearing damage in humans. North Louisiana residents are not experiencing extended close-range exposure to individual cicadas. They are experiencing a distributed chorus where individual contributors sit at various distances, which produces a net effect the oppressive to visitors and unremarkable to residents.
The cicada is calling. North Louisiana residents are not experiencing extended close-range exposure to individual cicadas. They are experiencing a distributed chorus where individual contributors are at various distances. The net effect is oppressive to visitors and unremarkable to residents, which is one of the cleaner definitions of acclimation available.
The calls are not random. Each species has a specific call pattern, often with a morning chorus, an afternoon peak, and an evening decline. Temperature affects call frequency: cooler days produce slower calling, hotter days faster. The cicada is running a biological process that responds to thermodynamic conditions. They are not trying to be loud.
Being loud is just what the process produces at 98 degrees. Temperature affects call frequency: cooler days produce slower calling, hotter days faster. A thermometer calibrated to cicada call rate would work in North Louisiana from June through September with reasonable accuracy. No one carries built this. It would work. The cicadas are not going to help you build it, but they would be an accurate data source.
When North Louisiana Cicadas Call
Annual cicadas in North Louisiana begin calling in late May or early June and run through September in most years, with different species peaking at different points in the season. The first calls of the year come from the largest, earliest-emerging species. The peak overlapping chorus fills July and August. The last calls of September come from late-season species that are finishing out the summer as temperatures begin their gradual decline.
Periodical cicada emergence years in North Louisiana are unpredictable if you do not know the brood schedule, which is public and searchable. The emergence concentrates in the brood's geographic range within North Louisiana and lasts approximately four to six weeks before the adults are gone and the 13-year clock resets.
What the Emergence Looks Like
A North Louisiana cicada emergence, annual or periodical, happens at dusk. The nymphs exit the soil through holes roughly the diameter of a finger, climb the nearest vertical surface, and split the nymphal skin along the back. The adult pulls itself free over thirty minutes to several hours. The new adult is pale green and soft, wings folded and wet, clinging to the bark while the exoskeleton hardens and the wings expand. By dawn it is dark-bodied, flight-capable, and calling.
The shed nymphal shell, the exuvia, stays attached to the bark for weeks. A tree with many exuviae on the lower trunk documents a significant emergence. Counting them on a known section of bark gives a rough estimate of emergence density. A productive emergence tree in North Louisiana's hardwood country can show dozens of exuviae per square foot on the lower three feet of trunk. The cicada is in the canopy, calling. The evidence it left behind contains nothing, which is still somehow the most impressive part.
What the Kites Are Doing
Mississippi kites arrive in North Louisiana in May and leave in September, timing that overlaps almost exactly with the annual cicada season. The overlap is not accidental. Kites hunt cicadas on the wing, catching them in the air after flushing them from the canopy. A kite working the edge of a hardwood stand in July is almost certainly cicada hunting. The approach is high and fast, the capture is midair, and the bird consumes the cicada while still flying before returning to the canopy for the next pass.
Kite concentrations in North Louisiana's bottomland hardwood forests track cicada density. Where the cicadas are loudest, the kites are most active. Both the kite and the cicada were in North Louisiana for millions of years, running the same interaction in the same canopy over the same soil in which the same nymphs developed. The kite is efficient at this. The cicada's counter-strategy is numerical: produce enough adults simultaneously that the kite cannot catch them all. So far, this strategy continues to work.
How Cicadas Shape the Forest Floor
Cicada emergence events deposit significant nutrients into North Louisiana's forest floor. A single large emergence produces thousands of adult bodies per acre within a few weeks. Adults that die naturally or get eaten leave carcasses that decompose quickly in the summer heat, releasing nitrogen and other nutrients directly into the surface soil. The forest benefits from the nutrient pulse. Trees in stands with large annual cicada populations show measurably higher nitrogen availability in the surface soil through summer.
The egg-laying damage, called flagging, kills twig tips and causes them to fall. Those fallen twig tips become organic matter on the forest floor that feeds fungi, bacteria, and the invertebrates that depend on them. The cicada's contribution to the forest floor is both nutrient input and physical structure, simultaneously. Neither of these effects gets discussed at the crawfish boil. Both are happening every summer.
The Annual vs. Periodical Difference
Annual cicadas in North Louisiana spend two to five years underground before emerging, but because different individuals are on different development schedules, adults appear every year. No single year's emergence involves the entire population. Periodical cicadas, by contrast, synchronize their development so the entire local population emerges in the same year. The mechanism producing this synchronization, how millions of nymphs in the same area all reach adulthood in the same summer, is not fully understood despite decades of research.
The leading hypothesis involves counting some environmental signal across years, possibly winter cold periods. The nymph underground for twelve years counted twelve winters and surfaced on the thirteenth. Nobody confirmed this mechanism directly. The cicada keeps doing it.
The Sound as Data
The cicada chorus is not just noise. Each species has a distinctive call that researchers use to survey populations without ever seeing an individual. A recording of the ambient sound at a site in July contains a readable species inventory of every cicada active that day. The timing of first calls in spring, the peak calling dates, and the date of last calling in fall all shift with temperature. Long-term acoustic monitoring of North Louisiana's cicada populations would document population trends and phenological shifts that visual surveys miss entirely.
Most North Louisiana residents who live near hardwood trees were passively monitoring cicada populations for years without realizing it. The year that the chorus was noticeably louder, the summer the calling started two weeks earlier than usual, the fall that cicadas called into October when they normally stop in September: these observations are real data. iNaturalist accepts cicada sound recordings and links them to specific locations and dates. The observation you make in your yard in July is part of a dataset that maps North Louisiana's cicada populations one recording at a time.
Accessibility
Cicada sound is the primary observation mode and it needs no equipment and no effort beyond being outside in North Louisiana between June and September, which is on its own a statement about the accessibility of the observation. A practiced ear separates individual species calls from within the chorus, using recordings from resources like Cicadas of North America available at online natural history databases.
Exuviae cling to tree bark at standing height, findable on any tree-lined street, park, or woodland edge in North Louisiana from June through August. A careful search of oak or pecan bark in July will find them in North Louisiana almost everywhere trees exist. The exuvia is the window into the underground life. Pick it up.
More Information
Cicadas of Eastern North America identification resources at discoverlife.org and the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology's cicada resources at umich.edu cover species identification, calls, and distribution. Magicicada.org covers periodical cicada brood schedules and emergence maps for North Louisiana.
iNaturalist accepts cicada observations with sound recordings and photographs from North Louisiana. A recording of the call identifies most North Louisiana cicada species.
Why They Are Loud
The loudness is the point. The male cicada is calling to females who are listening from within a chorus of competing males all calling simultaneously. To be heard, he needs volume. Volume needs power, and the tymbal mechanism is specifically evolved to produce maximum sound output at minimum metabolic cost. The tymbals buckle in milliseconds. The muscles that drive them are among the most efficient sound-production tissues in the animal kingdom. He is calling all day at near-maximum volume and not particularly tired at the end of it.
The chorus dynamic amplifies the individual. A single male calling in isolation is audible from a distance. A hundred males calling together produce a wall of sound that changes the acoustic character of the landscape. The female in that landscape is not overwhelmed. They is filtering. Their nervous system processes the species-specific frequency and timing of their own species' call and attends to it selectively. The rest is background. They was doing this for longer than the oak trees they is sitting in were alive.
What They Eat
Adult cicadas are fluid feeders. They insert their piercing mouthparts into plant tissue and feed on xylem sap, the relatively dilute fluid moving from roots to leaves through the vascular system. Xylem sap is low in nutrients, and adult cicadas feed to maintain hydration and minimal energy requirements rather than for significant nutritional gain. The adult stage is primarily about reproduction, not feeding. The years of larval feeding on root fluids from underground produced the fat reserves the adult is running on.
Cicada nymphs underground feed on root fluids from trees and woody plants in the same way, inserting their mouthparts into roots. The nymph is doing the same thing at a different location and life stage. Both the adult in the canopy and the nymph in the soil are processing plant fluids. The difference is that the nymph is doing it for years and the adult is doing it for weeks. The adult is not fattening up. They carries already done that. They is here to call, to mate, and to lay eggs, and then they will be done.
The Ecology of the Emergence
When annual cicadas emerge in large numbers from a given site, the emergence provides a concentrated food pulse for every predator in the area. Birds, particularly those that cache food, shift their foraging behavior dramatically during emergence events. Squirrels eat them. Raccoons eat them. Fish in ponds and streams near emergence sites eat the adults that fall or land on the water surface. Spiders, mantises, and robber flies intercept them in flight and at rest.
The cicada is prey for everything and adopted a strategy that works: produce so many individuals at once that predators cannot consume them all. The situation is called predator saturation. The emergence overwhelms the capacity of predators to eat cicadas, and enough individuals survive to reproduce regardless of how many are consumed. The strategy works best in periodical cicadas, whose synchronized emergence after years underground maximizes the saturation effect. Annual cicadas rely on it less but benefit from it on peak emergence days.
The Shed Skin as Natural History
The exuvia clinging to the oak bark in July is a complete record of the nymph's body structure at the moment of final molt. The leg joints are intact. The developing wing pads are visible as the areas that became the adult's wings. The empty head capsule with its preserved eye structures and mouthparts shows the feeding apparatus the nymph used for years underground. The split down the back of the thorax is where the adult emerged.
Collecting exuviae is legal, costs nothing, and produces a tangible connection to the underground phase of the cicada's life the point is otherwise inaccessible. A collection of exuviae from different species shows size differences, structural differences in the front legs used for digging, and differences in body proportions that reflect the different ecological niches occupied by different species.
An exuvia from a 13-year periodical cicada is identical in function to an exuvia from an annual cicada: both are the former skin of an animal that spent years underground before that moment. Both are worth the thirty seconds it takes to find one and look at it closely.
The North Louisiana Summer Context
North Louisiana's climate is what it is in July and August: hot, humid, and close. The cicadas are louder in that heat, calling faster as ambient temperature rises, producing a soundtrack that amplifies the physical experience of the season. Standing in the shade of a large oak in August with cicadas calling at full volume is a complete sensory experience the point is specific to this place and this time of year.
The cicada is not making the summer worse. The cicada is the summer, biologically and acoustically. They was here, calling from the canopies of North Louisiana's trees, since before there were people in North Louisiana to find it loud. The season belongs to their. Residents are experiencing it in the background of their actual purpose, which is reproduction, and which was proceeding with reliable success for millions of years regardless of how anyone feels about the volume.
Telling the Species Apart
North Louisiana's annual cicadas are species-specific in their calls, and the call is the most reliable field identification tool available for most of them. Learning the calls of the most common species in North Louisiana transforms the summer soundscape from undifferentiated noise into a layered chorus of distinct species. The green-winged cicada has a rising and falling buzz recognizable once calibrated to it. The Resh cicada produces a call the point is distinctive enough to stop people walking under the right tree.
Recordings from Cicadas of North America resources online cover the North Louisiana species. The iNaturalist app accepts sound recordings and will return identification suggestions. An observer who can separate three species by ear is getting more information from the same summer afternoon than an observer who just experiences the noise. Both are reasonable choices. One of them involves knowing the names.
The physical appearance of adults counts less for identification in cicadas than in most insect groups, because the calls are so species-specific and so accessible. But for the cicadas that are visually distinctive, the green wings of Diceroprocta vitripennis being the clearest example in North Louisiana, appearance confirms what the sound suggests. The green-winged cicada carries green wings. The identification is not complicated.
Periodical Cicadas in North Louisiana
North Louisiana falls within the range of 13-year periodical cicadas, Brood XIX specifically, which is the largest periodical cicada brood by geographic range in North America. Brood XIX emergences within North Louisiana represent one of the natural history events with no equivalent in the annual calendar. Millions of individuals emerging from a site, calling at densities that change the character of the landscape, breeding and dying within weeks, and then being gone for another 13 years.
Residents who experience a Brood XIX emergence in North Louisiana and understand what they are watching are having one of the genuinely rare natural history experiences available in North Louisiana. Residents who do not understand what they are watching still experience it, but with significantly more confusion and slightly less appreciation. The difference is knowing that it was scheduled 13 years ago, by the nymphs that were already underground when it was last happening, and that the schedule is as reliable as anything in North Louisiana natural history.
The cicadas were in North Louisiana longer than the trees they are calling from. They will be here after the current generation of trees. The sound in August is not an interruption. It is the baseline condition of North Louisiana in summer, produced by animals that were maintaining that baseline for millions of years without any assistance, acknowledgment, or complaint about the heat.
The individual species articles for the green-winged cicada and the Resh cicada cover the specific identifications, calls, and ecology of two of the most recognizable annual cicadas in North Louisiana. Start there if the noise carries ever made you curious about who specifically is responsible.
North Louisiana's summer belongs to them. The residents are living in it. They got here first. The trees got here first too. The cicadas were already here. Everyone is working with that.
The cicada chorus in North Louisiana is a calendar, a population survey, and a food chain operating simultaneously. Every July it confirms that the oaks are standing, the soil is intact enough to support years of nymph development, and the kites found North Louisiana on their way north. When the chorus changes, something in the system changed. The sound is the signal.
North Louisiana residents who have heard it their entire lives are already in a position to notice. Stop and listen. The July afternoon in North Louisiana is not silent for a reason. The cicadas are running their part of the system on schedule, the same schedule they kept before the oaks had their current names and after they do.
META TITLE: Cicadas of North Louisiana | NLW Wildlife Guide
META DESCRIPTION: The sound of a North Louisiana summer is the cicada. Not one of them — all of them at once. Here's who they are, what they're doing, and why they're so loud.
FOCUS KEYPHRASE: cicadas North Louisiana
SECONDARY KEYWORDS: North Louisiana cicadas, Louisiana cicada species, annual cicadas Louisiana, periodical cicadas North Louisiana, 13-year cicada Louisiana, cicada sound Louisiana, cicada identification North Louisiana, cicada exuvia Louisiana, green-winged cicada Louisiana, Resh cicada Louisiana
OG DESCRIPTION: North Louisiana's cicadas are not locusts. They are something more interesting. Here's the full picture: the species, the underground life, the chorus, and why the noise makes complete sense once you understand it.