Introducing the Cicada.....

In the afternoon, between the hours of 2 and 4pm it's siesta time, a time to relax, a time to snooze, a time to keep out of the sun.

It's a pity that someone didn't tell the cicado, a relatively small member of the flying insect family, no bigger than the watch face of an average sized mans watch.

It looks like a very large fly and I've heard them as we've walked through the campo (countryside) and they make a rather odd clicky buzzy sound, the name cicada is a direct translation from the latin word meaning buzzer (That's the high brow intellectual bit over - promise). They are harmless to us, they don't bite or sting, and don't destroy plants BUT....

..... the male cicada makes the loudest sound in the insect world; and yesterday the one in the photo gave us a front row rendition, right in the middle of siesta! Some cicada's can reach 120 decibells at close range, according to Wikipedia - and I think we can vouch for it.

Being siesta time, it obviously decided to have a rest on the column outside the lounge door to the villa - about 6 feet from the door. Having settled for siesta it decided to call to it's friends. Now whether it was the close proximity to the villa, or whether it was the amount of surrounding concrete I don't know - what I do know is that it sounded like a high pitched hammer drill going off inside my head. It was a noise that got right inside your skull and reverberated around your head.

At first I thought that we had workmen???(siesta time, Spain, workmen - doesn't really compute) digging up the road outside but everytime we went outside it stopped and we couldn't see any vans or machinery but within minutes of going back inside, it started again. Infact, it happened so frequently, I thought we were on candid camera!

Eventually, we tracked it down on the inside of the column and chased it off - peace was restored to siesta time!

These are not creatures to have in a confined space.