News Bees, Fog Dogs & Insect Serenades

Last night the girls got on one of their barking binges. Several times they’d spring up and run around the house barking out the windows. I’d get up and stare them down until they, with heads hanging and tails tucked would return to their beds. After the second round, I flipped on the outside flood lights -- um… like I’d have flood lights inside – to see if I could see what was riling them and was surprised to have the light swallowed up by a dense blanket of grey fog.

Going back to the bedroom, I mentioned the fog to Marie and she was surprised because just a few minutes before all this began she had noted how bright and clear the moon was as she looked out the bedroom window.

After 3 or 4 rounds in twenty minutes or so, the fog went away as suddenly as it had come (must have been a Mountain Wraith) and the girls settled in to sleep the rest of the night. Lucky them.

By now I was fully awake and am NOT blessed with the ability to just lay down and go instantly to sleep at any time any time I choose like everyone else in my household. By the time I got to sleep, it was nearly time to get up. And I’ve been foggy-headed all day. Curse those mountain wraiths!

For the past two days I’ve spent a fair amount of time in my finishing room as I’m working on staining the big curio cabinet I’ve been working on. Each time I go in there, a few minutes after I get started, I hear a familiar droning buzz…the drone of a News Bee. Now, in case they call these critters by some other name where you are, these are insects that look like small hornets; yellow and black stripes, but the size of a wasp and his abdomen is kind of squared off and gnarly instead of being a stinger tipped cone like a wasp or hornet. They have the peculiar habit of just hanging motionless in the air watching people as they do things.

This one would come and hang about a half inch outside of my finishing room window screen each time I went in and would stay there for the longest time. Normally a couple of minutes of watching is enough then they are off to report to their Editor in Chief. But this guy would stay for a good 10 minutes, barely moving, just watching. I could swear he had a note pad! It got to where I would talk to him and explain what I was doing. I named him Ray, after a local reporter I know.

We have some other strange bugs. Actually, living in the woods as we do, we have a lot of strange and wonderful bugs. Some I’ve never seen before, like the News Bee. Others are more common but they do strange things.

At night we are serenaded by an insect; locusts (grasshoppers) I think, that make a three part thrumming buzz; chic-ka-chaw. But what is unusual is that they do it in unison. It’s hard to say how many of them there are in the trees around us, but it sounds like millions and they’ll get into a rhythm and perfect unison with their song for 10 to 15 seconds. Then a few loose the beat and anarchy spreads for a second, then they rally and get back into rhythm. And they do it over and over and over, all night long. It’s really quite entertaining to listen to while I’m laying in bed not sleeping. I don’t have to strain to hear them, they are quite loud.

Perhaps locusts (or whatever) do this everywhere, I’m not sure about that all I know is that I’ve never noticed it before. But another local resident has been commemorated as being very unusual and bug fans from all around the nation come to see it.

There is one place near Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park where for a few weeks each year tens of thousands of fireflies gather and flash complex patterns in perfect unison. It’s really quite intriguing and no one knows how or why they do it. And apparently this particular phenomenon occurs no where else in our country.

Just one more perk from living here in The Great Smoky Mountains.

That’s about it this time.