Cicadas and the Bird Homestead

Thank you to Patch user Anne Stillman of Save the Bird Homestead,for contributing this article to Rye Patch.

 Lately, discussion of the 17-year cicadas has appeared everywhere in print and online.  Their ability to tell time and emerge on schedule every 17 years is one of the most puzzling mysteries of nature to a layperson like me.  But if there was ever anyone who understood them, it was a frequent guest at the Bird Homestead here in Rye, entomologist William T. Davis.

Davis and Henry Bird were friends and colleagues in the field of entomology.  Coincidentally, they shared the same birthday, October 12, although Davis was older, born in 1862, while Henry Bird was born in 1869. 

Six cycles ago for the 17-year cicada in 1928, Davis, who was from Staten Island, was the foremost authority in the world on periodic cicadas, and Henry Bird was the president of the New York Entomological Society.  The Staten Island Museum has an extensive archive of the William T. Davis papers, including 70 letters from Henry Bird.  Most probably, some of these contain comments on the 17-year cicada.

Due to the work of Davis, the Museum also owns the largest cicada collection in North America.  Many specimens are on view now in the exhibit, “They’re Baaack!  Return of the 17-year Cicada.”  It should provide just about everything you could hope to learn about periodic cicadas. 

According to the museum’s web site, you can see “sculpture inspired by the Cicada, … a timeline of past emergences linked to historic events, a time-lapse video of emerging cicadas, a hands on video microscope, a Google map showing where cicadas are emerging, … unusual Cicada ephemera and facts from around the globe, activities for kids and more.”

In the near future, I will make the trip to the Staten Island Museum with our naturalist, Alison Beall, and other volunteers to start to transcribe Henry Bird’s many letters to Davis.  We would be delighted if any students or adults would like to volunteer to help with this effort.  We will post any interesting tidbits on our facebook page, meeting-house-and-bird-homestead.  If you are interested in joining this project, please email birdhomestead.meetinghouse@gmail.com or call 914-967-0099.

I am told that the 17-year cicada is very unlikely to emerge in Rye.  Our colleague Tom Andersen from Save the Sound reports that he saw them on June 2 in Croton on the other side of the county http://thissphere.blogspot.com/.  If it is any consolation, the annual cicada should emerge here in July.

Anne Stillman is a historic preservation consultant and the president of the nonprofit Committee to Save the Bird Homestead, which operates the Bird Homestead and the Rye Meeting House, two adjoining historic properties on Milton Road.