Glued birds and deep-fried insects
“CIGALES”, a regular reader texted from Provence in France, “are being hunted by several chats (cats) from a terrace and gentle geckos are also relentlessly played with and killed. It’s an evening battleground”. Nature in tooth and claw, indeed.
Do the chats eat the cigales — those insect noise-makers (which we call cicadas), treasured in the Far East by gastronomes who fry them in batter?
The French moggies apparently show no interest beyond taking over domestic hunting space and treating everybody with disdain much like the super-prowler in last week’s tale swishing its tail at my dawn disturbance.
But some people in Provence are unhappy at the activities of hunters cruelly trapping songbirds with glue for a cage bird trade — or just shooting and eating them. More of this later.
Cicadas’ evening wing vibrations are unknown sounds in Ireland. These leathery creatures are relatives of our friend the froghopper of cuckoo-spit fame. They suck sap from trees with their nymphs spending years underground gorging themselves on roots.
They are from a wide order of insects called homophera with piercing beaks — which fold back — to suck the tree juices and make loud whistling noises to attract females by vibrating membranes on their sides.
Their leather jackets probably give them a crunchy bite-in-the-batter for diners so inclined to insect sampling. The French have traditionally complained about the noise they make — though there is the exception of writer and essayist Joseph Joubert of the 18th and 19th century. He was lyrical.
“Sunshine and summer heat without the accompaniment of the cicadas’ song, or the quivering of the air, is like a dance without music.”
Another scribe of the era, Jean-Henri Fabre, complained about the noise.
“A sudden sound rings out like a cry of anguish, strident and short. It is the desperate wail of the cicada.”
Some Provencals, but not all, are also wailing about the slaughter of songbirds in this part of France, the countryside of Jean de Florette, rich in flora and fauna, where caged thrushes and blackbirds are used to lure wild birds to hedgerows which have been coated with glue.
A spokesperson from Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux says that although glue-trapping has been banned in the EU since the 1970s, it still goes on in some areas of France as it is considered ‘traditional’.
It was also once common in Ireland. I recall, as a bird-nesting boy, seeing men with small cages at hedgerows untangling struggling birds caught by what was called ‘bird lime’. The victims were destined for cage bird fanciers who traded with one another or at markets.
It is a shock to discover that today such trappers in Provence-Alps-Cote d’Azur are licensed to operate in a ‘closed’ season between October and December to catch birds — or kill and eat the ones they can’t trade. Why can’t they just do with fried cicadas/cigales for supper provided by their hunting chats?