For generations of New Forest commoners and walkers, the high-pitched, metallic hum of the New Forest cicada, Britain’s only native cicada species was a familiar woodland phenomenon.
Yet by the 1980s, this unique acoustic experience was rapidly fading from our local soundscape.
The insect favoured sunny, south-facing clearings with specific, lightly grazed shrubbery.
As forestry practice changed and ancient grazing regimes shifted throughout the late twentieth century, this delicate equilibrium of habitat disappeared.
(Image: Claire Sheppard)
The open, sunlit canopies they required to thrive began to close over, and their traditional breeding grounds fell into deep shade.
Throughout the 1980s, the distinctive song of the male cicada was a genuine rarity.
The insect’s call sits at the very upper limits of human hearing, and was notoriously difficult for anyone over forty to detect, lending yet more mystery to its disappearing act. Entomologists and local natural history enthusiasts scoured the Hampshire undergrowth, but summer sightings continued to diminish.
By the early 1990s, the song had ceased entirely and the New Forest cicada was eventually presumed extinct on British shores; a heart-breaking loss to our region’s rich zoological heritage.
But this remarkable, golden-ringed insect’s story doesn’t end in the dusty pages of the local history books.
Driven by a fervent, new partnership between the Species Recovery Trust, Forestry England and local partners, an ambitious conservation project is currently rewriting the future of our lost cicada.
In a pioneering attempt to resurrect this vanished species, experts recently carried a trailblazing group of female cicadas from a robust population in northern France.
Incredibly, those vital insects were housed in custom-built, carefully monitored enclosures inside Paultons Park on the edge of the New Forest.
Circada (Image: Fritz Geller-Grimm, CC BY-SA 3.0)
It’s hoped that these freshly imported females will successfully lay their eggs in raspberry canes and young hazel saplings, effectively restarting the native colony.
Because a cicada spends the vast majority of its life entirely out-of-sight underground as a subterranean nymph – sometimes taking up to eight years to mature before finally emerging to sing – patience is the ultimate requirement.
If these tiny nymphs successfully burrow into the Hampshire soil to feed and grow, the iconic hum of the cicada could finally return to the sun-dappled canopy by the end of this decade.
Time will tell.