Sirius, the heaven's brightest star had its conjunct with the sun July 4, and the Dog Days of August have had us in their crosshairs ever since. Ancients feared the hot, humid Dog Days. It was as an evil time "when seas boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, causing man to have burning fevers, hysterics, and frenzies."

Luckily, the ancients were wrong. It gets hot. That's all. Dog Days tell me football is coming and that can be a frenzied time for sure, but it's also a time filled with the din of chirring cicadas, what some refer to as "locusts" and what others confuse with katydids, those treetop cousins of grasshoppers and crickets.

A summer day isn't quite Southern without singing cicadas and it seems they love the heat of day, singing best during sultry hours. To me, the singsong rise and fall of cicadas, a storm's earthy rain smell, and the happy singing of rain-saturated frogs trademark summer in the South. Sure cicadas and frogs exist throughout the world but our cicadas and frogs give the South dimension, a sort of grandeur in this boy's eyes. There's something especially Southern about cicadas, the annual variety and the spectacular perennial ones.

Georgia's cicadas made it into literature. James Dickey alluded to them in Deliverance. The men drive into the fictional town of Oree, seeking drivers to take their cars to where they plan to end their canoe trip down the Cahulawassie. "We went to a Texaco station and asked if there was anybody there who'd like to make some money. When Lewis killed the engine, the air came alive and shook with insects, even in the center of town, an in-and-out responding silence of noise." That's as good a description of cicadas as I've heard.

Two summers hence, the air will shake with an in-and-out responding silence of noise like no other for we'll have special visitors: 13-year periodical cicadas, those alien bugs with red bulbous eyes and orange-veined wings.

These industrial-strength cicadas are pretty much harmless, neither biting nor stinging. They don't even harm plants that much. These periodical cicadas are classified as belonging to broods, and Georgia is home to "Brood 19" of the 13-year cicada, which last emerged in 1998. Look for it to return the summer of 2011 owing to its uncanny sense of synchronization. The Great Southern Brood, as it's also known, occurs throughout the classic South and in Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia.

According to a 1962 report from the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan, 13-year cicadas emerged in Lincoln County on May 16, 1959, but I was too young to recall that. I do remember two later occurrences of this red-eyed primeval insect with its shrill droning and pork-rind-like exoskeleton left behind, shed at the nymph stage. I remember, too, how its materialization from the ground left finger-sized holes everywhere.

The adults, once their bodies harden and wings dry, take flight. And then there's no escaping the male's shrill whine. The male cicada makes the loudest sound in the insect world, its trilling can carry up to a mile. The trilling is all about attracting a female. Once the little critters consummate their relationship, the female will lay eggs within the branch tips. The young will emerge six to 10 weeks later, drop to the ground, and dig down to the tree roots where they'll feed on the tree's nutrients and emerge 13 years later.

In addition to its raucous nature, a bit of mystery accompanies the insects. Markings very much like a W or a P appear on their wings. I rem checking the so-called letters on their lacy wings. An old wives' tale holds that the W means war is coming while P means there will be peace. Fat chance of that because there's always a war going on somewhere. Another old tale states that it's 90 days until the first frost after you hear the first cicada, but that refers to the annual, black-eyed variety, not the red-eyed perennial that literally causes such a buzz.

One thing is for sure. No other insect creates as much excitement as periodical cicadas. You get up one morning, hear a sound that reverberates through the woods, walk outside, and see the critters darting about, and you know you're in for several weeks of clamoring, flying bugs. From dawn into the night, the males shatter the quiet with their ear-splitting song. It's like some mega machinery howling at thousands of revolutions per minute.

Other species of cicadas exist besides those that take 13 and 17 years to develop. The aforementioned "Dog-day cicadas," which some folks call "July flies" take two to five years to undergo metamorphosis. When cycles overlap and both species are out and about, you can tell them apart. Periodical cicadas have red eyes; annual cicadas have black eyes.

It's sad in a way to see the cicada fest end and yet it's good to get some quiet again. When the cicadas reproduce and their offspring burrow into the earth to start another 13-year cycle, something not so pleasant replaces the noise, something that reminds us their cycle of life and death truly has played out yet again. Their dead bodies plummet from the canopy leaving a smell some compare to Limburger cheese and that's the end of this amazing spectacle, for 13 years anyway.

Email Tom with feedback and ideas for new columns. tompol @earthlink.net