Green-Winged Cicada

The green-winged cicada is the one with green wings. This sounds obvious until you are standing under a tree in July in North Louisiana trying to determine which of the several species currently generating the wall of sound is which, at which point having a species with a visible field mark that matches its common name becomes genuinely useful. The green-winged cicada is Diceroprocta vitripennis. They have green wings. Start there. They are one of the most widespread annual cicada species in North Louisiana, calling from oaks, pecans, and other hardwoods through the hottest weeks of summer in every parish in North Louisiana. The call is a rising and falling buzz that weaves through the chorus in a pattern experienced observers can separate from the background with practice. They were in the canopy the whole time. They just needed an introduction. What the Green-Winged Cicada Actually Looks Like The green-winged cicada is a medium-sized cicada running about an inch to an inch and a quarter in body length. The most distinctive feature is in the name: the wings are green. Specifically, the wing veins and the area near the wing base are distinctly green, giving the folded wings at rest a greenish cast the visible at moderate distance if the light is right. The body is black with green markings on the thorax and head. The eyes are reddish-brown. They are stockier and slightly smaller than some of the larger annual cicada species in North Louisiana but is built on the same basic cicada plan: broad head with large compound eyes, stout body, wings held roof-like over the abdomen at rest, and the mouthparts of a fluid feeder folded against the underside of the thorax. Up close they are an impressive animal. From a distance they are a blur in the canopy and a significant contributor to the ambient noise level. Both descriptions are accurate. They apply to many North Louisiana residents as well. Males have the tymbal organs on the abdomen. Females have a prominent ovipositor at the abdomen tip for depositing eggs in tree twigs. Close range separates the sexes. Most North Louisiana residents have not separated cicada sexes at close range. Most North Louisiana residents have not looked at a cicada at close range. The opportunity presents the thing every July from every mature hardwood in the 26 parishes. Most North Louisiana residents are not examining cicadas at close range, which is a missed opportunity because the detail is worth seeing. The cicada is not making herself easy to examine. They are in the canopy. They are not coming down. The Green-Winged Cicada's Call The call of Diceroprocta vitripennis is a sustained buzz with a characteristic rising and falling quality, sometimes described as a whirring or a buzz saw spinning up and winding down in cycles. The call is loud individually and becomes part of the chorus texture in areas with multiple calling males. It peaks in the hottest hours of the afternoon, which is the period North Louisiana residents are most strongly motivated to be inside, and therefore the period most people experience as part of the general heat rather than as a specific sound from a specific animal. Learning the call from a recording and then listening for it within the chorus is the skill that converts the summer noise into information. Once calibrated, the ear pulls the green-winged cicada call from the broader chorus. The call does not hide. Nothing about a cicada hides. The not the strategy. The audio clip on iNaturalist or on Cicadas of North America resources is the calibration tool. Finding the call in the canopy is the observation. Males call primarily from the upper canopy, which puts them at their loudest at the top of a typical North Louisiana hardwood. The call volume drops significantly with distance, and the individual male calling from 40 feet up in an oak is quieter at the observer's level than the sheer density of the chorus suggests. The wall of sound is the sum of many individuals calling from many heights and distances, with the green-winged cicada contributing them specific timbre to the aggregate. Where the Green-Winged Cicada Lives Diceroprocta vitripennis uses hardwood trees as both adult habitat and nymph host. In North Louisiana that means primarily oaks, pecans, and hickories, though they use a range of hardwood species and is not strictly host-specific in the way that some Unionidae mussels are host-specific with their fish. they need trees large enough to have well-developed root systems for nymph feeding and substantial canopy for adult calling and egg-laying. Urban and suburban tree canopies in North Louisiana are as productive for them as natural woodland. A neighborhood with mature oaks or pecans carries green-winged cicadas in the canopy from June through August. A rural property with a stand of mature hardwoods carries them at higher density. A forest road through an established hardwood stand in July carries them at every tree with enough canopy to support the population. They occurs throughout North Louisiana's 26 parishes wherever mature hardwood trees grow, which is everywhere in North Louisiana. They are not a specialist. They are a generalist using the dominant tree species of North Louisiana's landscape in the same way the landscape's dominant bird species do: broadly, abundantly, and without distinguishing between the managed urban tree and the natural woodland tree. The Green-Winged Cicada Underground The nymph of Diceroprocta vitripennis spends two to five years underground feeding on root fluids from hardwood trees before emerging. The underground phase is entirely invisible to observation above the surface. The nymph moves through the soil using strong front legs adapted for digging, molting through several growth stages, growing through successive size increases, and eventually constructing the exit tunnel that brings them to the surface for them final molt. The exit hole in the soil is about the diameter of a finger. Fresh holes in soft soil near large hardwood trees in June and July indicate active emergence. The emergence happens at night, in the early morning hours, or in late afternoon when the soil surface is not at peak temperature. The nymph exits, climbs the nearest vertical surface, and undergoes its final molt over the course of thirty minutes to several hours. The exuvia left on the bark after molting is the most persistent physical record of the emergence. Green-winged cicada exuviae cling to oak and pecan bark in North Louisiana through August, remaining attached to the bark after the adult departed. They do not indicate that a cicada is currently present in that tree. They indicate that one was, sometime in the past several months, which is still good information. Most people who find one think they have found a dead cicada, look closer, realize it is empty, and then look up for the cicada that was in it. The cicada is in the canopy above them, calling. It left the shell on the bark as casually as most people leave the gym. How the Green-Winged Cicada Lays Eggs Female green-winged cicadas lay eggs in the twigs of hardwood trees by inserting the ovipositor into the bark and depositing eggs in rows within the wound. The wound causes the twig tip to die, turn brown, and eventually fall. The flagging, the scattered brown twig tips visible on lawns and under trees in July and August that suggest the tree is dying. The tree is not dying. It is experiencing cicada egg-laying in its small twigs, which it experienced for as long as once green-winged cicadas and hardwood trees in North Louisiana, and which it tolerates with the equanimity of a large organism that loses some twig tips every summer and finds this manageable. The fallen twig tips contain the developing eggs. The eggs hatch in the fall, the first-growth stage nymphs drop to the ground and burrow into the soil, and the underground phase begins. The nymph will not be at the surface again for years. The twig that fell is the last visible evidence of the egg-laying event that started it all. What Eats the Green-Winged Cicada Adult green-winged cicadas are prey for any bird large enough to handle them: blue jays, kestrels, merlins during migration, red-headed woodpeckers, Mississippi kites, and fish crows all take cicadas opportunistically in summer. Merlins migrating through North Louisiana in fall showed up documented eating the late-season annual cicadas still calling in September. The cicada that called undisturbed for six weeks sometimes ends as a migrating falcon's lunch on its way south, which is the kind of thing that happens in North Louisiana skies in September and goes largely unwitnessed. Robber flies are the most consistently visible cicada predators in North Louisiana. The large robber flies in the genus Promachus and related genera intercept cicadas in flight, taking animals close to their own body size. The robber fly that grabs a green-winged cicada mid-flight is doing something that looks impossible until you have seen it several times, at which point it looks merely improbable. Both insects are impressive at close range. The robber fly is having a better afternoon. The cicada was having a fine afternoon until about a second ago. The robber fly was having a better one. Telling This Species from Similar Species The green wing coloration is the primary distinguishing feature of Diceroprocta vitripennis among North Louisiana cicadas. Most annual cicada species in North Louisiana have clear wings with dark or orange-tinted veins. A medium-sized cicada with distinctly green-tinted wings and green body markings is Diceroprocta vitripennis. Size helps narrow the field: they are medium-sized, larger than small Neotibicen species that also call from North Louisiana hardwoods but smaller than the largest annual cicadas in North Louisiana. Combined with the green wing color, the identification is usually straightforward at moderate distance in good light. The call is the secondary confirmation: the rising-and-falling buzz separates them from species with different call structures within the chorus. A cicada that looks right and sounds right is almost certainly right. A photograph submitted to iNaturalist with a sound recording attached will produce expert confirmation for observers who want the identification documented. The Green-Winged Cicada and People The green-winged cicada interacted with North Louisiana humans primarily in the form of noise. They are contributing to the summer soundscape that defines the region's acoustic character from June through August. They do not sting, bite, or damage healthy trees. The interaction with people is acoustic. The flagging looks like tree damage and is not. The noise sounds like a problem and is not. They are calling, reproducing, and laying eggs in the twigs that fell on the lawn. The twig tips are fine to pick up and examine. The eggs inside they are not visible to the naked eye but are there. North Louisiana residents who have spent entire summers under the trees they calls from without knowing them name are in the majority. They were there every summer they were outside. They were there every summer anyone in North Louisiana was outside. The name is new. They are not. The Green-Winged Cicada's Season The green-winged cicada in North Louisiana peaks in July and August, the hottest weeks of the year, which is not a coincidence. The high ambient temperature accelerates calling rates and adult activity. They calls faster in the heat. A July afternoon at 95 degrees with 80 percent humidity is peak green-winged cicada performance. North Louisiana provides this reliably. They emerges from the soil starting in late June in most years, calling intensifies through July, and the population declines through August as the season's adults complete reproduction and die. Late-calling individuals persist into September in warm years. The exuviae cling to tree bark from July through September. The Call in Detail The green-winged cicada's call is a sustained buzz with a characteristic quality that distinguishes it from the other large annual cicadas in North Louisiana. The call builds from a soft start to full volume in the first second and then holds steady, producing a continuous tone rather than the pulsed or waving patterns of some other species. At close range the call has a buzzing, electrical quality, as if the air itself is vibrating. Males call from exposed surfaces in the upper canopy, typically on the sunny side of the tree. The calling position is usually high enough that the source is difficult to see from the ground even when the call is loud enough to hear fifty yards away. Following the sound to its source needs patience, binoculars, and the knowledge that the cicada is almost certainly higher in the canopy than you expect. The first confirmed visual of a calling green-winged cicada for a new observer almost always involves looking up past the obvious height, then higher, and then finding the animal well above that. The Underground Years in Detail A green-winged cicada nymph hatching from an egg in July spends the next two to five years underground, working its way down through the soil to tree roots, feeding on root phloem, growing through a series of instars. The nymph does not maintain a fixed burrow the way the digger crawfish does. It moves through the soil as it feeds, following root tissue and responding to soil moisture and temperature. The nymph that hatched two feet from the trunk it came from may be feeding on roots ten feet away when it finally triggers the emergence response in its fifth year. The trigger for emergence is soil temperature: when soil temperature at the nymph's depth reaches a threshold in late spring, the final-stage nymph tunnels to the surface and emerges. The timing is consistent enough within a species at a location that experienced observers can predict the first emergence date within a week or two based on spring temperature patterns. The nymph has no awareness of this. The soil temperature is the switch. The North Louisiana Hardwood Connection The green-winged cicada's distribution in North Louisiana tracks the distribution of mature hardwood forest. The nymphs spend their development feeding on tree roots, and the tree species composition and age structure of the stand determines which cicada species can complete development there. Young tree plantations and recently disturbed forest do not support established cicada populations. The sound of the green-winged cicada in a North Louisiana hardwood stand is an acoustic indicator that the stand is old enough and structurally complex enough to support multi-year nymph development. This connection makes the cicada an informal indicator of forest maturity. A hardwood stand that supported green-winged cicada populations for decades is a stand with deep root systems, diverse understory, and the kind of soil biology that supports nymph development across a two-to-five year underground period. Clear-cutting and replanting resets the cicada population to zero. Recovery of cicada populations to pre-disturbance density takes multiple insect generations, ten to twenty years at minimum. The chorus is the forest speaking. A July afternoon in a North Louisiana bottomland with green-winged cicadas calling at full density is the sound of a functioning ecosystem. Most North Louisiana residents who have heard it their entire lives have never thought about what it means. Now they have the vocabulary. The Cicada and the Oak The green-winged cicada's primary nymph host in North Louisiana is the live oak and water oak complex that dominates bottomland and upland hardwood forests in the region. Both tree species produce extensive lateral root systems that support nymph populations at multiple depths and distances from the trunk. A mature live oak in a suburban North Louisiana yard may be supporting nymph populations from several consecutive cohorts simultaneously: last year's eggs developing at shallow depth, two-year nymphs working middle-depth roots, and final-stage nymphs tunneling toward the surface. The oak does not register any of this. Root phloem is produced continuously, the small pressure each individual nymph creates on the root system is negligible, and the oak's root system extends far enough that nymph activity at any given point affects only a fraction of the total root mass. The oak fed the cicada population for millions of years without harm to either party. The relationship predates the presence of human observers. Both are doing fine. Accessibility The call is the access point. It needs no equipment, no terrain navigation, and no special conditions beyond being outside in North Louisiana between late June and September. The exuvia on oak bark needs finding a mature hardwood tree and examining the bark from standing height. Both observations sit within reach of any neighborhood with mature hardwood trees in every parish of North Louisiana. The green-winged cicada herself, the adult sitting in the canopy, shows through binoculars in open-canopy situations, and the call tracks them to the source. They calls from exposed branch surfaces, particularly in the upper canopy, and in good light the green wings catch and hold the sun in a way that makes them findable if you are looking in the right tree at the right angle. More Information Cicadas of North America identification resources at discoverlife.org include Diceroprocta vitripennis call recordings and distribution maps. The University of Michigan Museum of Zoology cicada resources at umich.edu cover species biology and identification. iNaturalist accepts green-winged cicada observations with photographs and sound recordings; the combination of visual and audio documentation produces reliable species-level identification for North Louisiana records. The Underground Years Two to five years is a long time to spend in the dark eating root fluids. The green-winged cicada nymph is doing exactly that for most of their existence, moving through North Louisiana's soil in the root zone of hardwood trees, molting through instars that increase their size incrementally, and building toward the final emergence that constitutes their entire adult life. The adult phase lasts weeks. The underground phase lasts years. Most of what the green-winged cicada is, biologically, happens where no one can see it. The nymph's front legs are modified for digging, flattened and robust in ways that are visible in the exuvia after the final molt. The digging apparatus that moved the nymph through years of soil is preserved in the shed skin clinging to the bark. Finding the exuvia and looking at the front legs is finding the record of the underground life, the tool that made it possible, frozen in chitin at the moment it was abandoned. They left it on the bark and flew away into a life that lasts weeks. The exuvia will outlast their by months. It does not appear to have feelings about this. The soil in the root zone of a North Louisiana hardwood tree in July contains nymphs at various developmental stages,: early instars from last year's eggs, intermediate instars from previous years' eggs, and late instars approaching emergence timing. The cicada nymphs underground are invisible from above and in most cases exceeds the adult population visible in the canopy by many times. The noise is impressive. The underground population is larger. What This Cicada Does for the Trees The relationship between the green-winged cicada and North Louisiana's hardwood trees is not parasitic in any damaging sense. The nymph feeding on root fluids removes a small amount of the resource the tree moves from roots to leaves. The tree produces far more of this fluid than the nymph removes, and the nymph's population density is not high enough to cause measurable tree stress under normal conditions. The flagging from egg-laying removes small twig tips, which the tree seals over and does not miss in any functional sense. What the cicada does for the tree is less obvious but real: the burrowing activity of nymphs aerates the soil around the root zone, improving drainage and oxygen availability for the roots. The exit holes at emergence create temporary drainage channels. The dead adults decompose and return nitrogen to the soil surface. The cicada is not a net drain on the tree. They is not a pest. They is a component of the tree's ecological context, the same way they was for as long as those tree species have existed in North Louisiana. The Population in North Louisiana Diceroprocta vitripennis is common in North Louisiana across all 26 parishes wherever mature hardwood trees occur. The species is not tracked by conservation programs because it is not at risk. The population is stable in North Louisiana, limited by hardwood canopy availability and soil conditions rather than by direct pressure. The urban hardwood canopy of North Louisiana's cities and towns supports a green-winged cicada population. The rural hardwood corridors of the bottomland parishes support a larger one. The longleaf pine uplands of the northern parishes support them at lower density where hardwoods occur in the understory and edges. The species is findable in July from any location in North Louisiana with mature hardwood trees, which covers most of the 26 parishes. They is the background acoustic presence of the North Louisiana hardwood landscape in summer. Knowing their name changes the experience of that summer afternoon without changing anything about the afternoon itself. The afternoon is still hot. They is still loud. Both of those things are now about someone specific. The Sound in Context A green-winged cicada calling from the canopy of a mature North Louisiana oak in July is producing approximately 90 decibels at one meter. They is one of potentially dozens of individuals calling from the same tree and hundreds calling from the surrounding canopy. The aggregate is what North Louisiana residents experience as the sound of summer: a continuous, layered, pulsing wall of noise that begins around midmorning as air temperatures rise and peaks in the early afternoon heat. The sound carries structure within it that most people do not attend to because it needs knowing what to listen for. The green-winged cicada's rising-and-falling buzz is one thread in the weave. The Resh cicada's call is another. The larger Neotibicen species contribute their own distinct voices. Learning to separate the threads is like learning to hear individual instruments in an orchestra after spending years experiencing the orchestra as a single undifferentiated sound. The orchestra was always there. The instruments were always distinct. The knowledge is what changes. The summer soundtrack of North Louisiana is dozens of species calling simultaneously, each to the females of its own species, each operating within a frequency and timing that minimizes interference with the others, each contributing to an acoustic environment that was present in this landscape for millions of years. The trees, the heat, and the sound are the same system. They are inseparable. The green-winged cicada is part of it, audibly, identifiably, every July, from every mature hardwood in the 26 parishes. They was doing their part of it every summer since the oaks were saplings. The green-winged cicada is in the hardwood canopy of North Louisiana right now, in July, calling at full volume from the sunny side of a tree that was there longer than the road below it. The call confirms the tree is there, the soil is intact, and the system is functioning. It confirms this every July. It will confirm it again next July. The confirmation costs nothing to receive. The only requirement is stopping to listen. The green-winged cicada is in the trees above most North Louisiana residents every summer. It was there every summer of their lives and will be there next summer. The observation is available to anyone who stops walking and looks up. The canopy is noisy. The animal making the noise is worth seeing at least once. Find the exuvia on the lower trunk first. Follow the trunk up. The cicada is higher than you think. The point is the whole observation. One summer afternoon, one mature oak, one exuvia on the lower trunk, one set of binoculars pointed at the upper canopy. The green-winged cicada will be there. It is there every July. It was there last July too. The green-winged cicada is in the canopy right now. The call identifies it. The emergence date documents it.

Accessibility

The call is the access point. It needs no equipment, no terrain navigation, and no special conditions beyond being outside in North Louisiana between late June and September. The exuvia on oak bark needs finding a mature hardwood tree and examining the bark from standing height. Both observations sit within reach of any neighborhood with mature hardwood trees in every parish of North Louisiana.

The green-winged cicada herself, the adult sitting in the canopy, shows through binoculars in open-canopy situations, and the call tracks them to the source. They calls from exposed branch surfaces, particularly in the upper canopy, and in good light the green wings catch and hold the sun in a way that makes them findable if you are looking in the right tree at the right angle.