Red Cicadas singing through the Garonne lowlands in midsummer

Red Cicadas have been calling across the Toulouse lowlands since mid-June, their songs reaching into riverside neighborhoods and university districts as recently as July 17. This Mediterranean insect sits at the northern edge of its range in France, and these warm oak-shaded valleys have long been one of its most reliable strongholds. Their nymphs spend several years underground in undisturbed soil before emerging as adults, making their midsummer chorus an acoustic marker of soil continuity in a city that has expanded dramatically across former oak scrubland.

What the cicadas reveal is worth attending to. Their presence here in late July falls within the expected window, but the warming Garonne summers are visibly lengthening that emergence season — a shift that could signal either range expansion into newly suitable habitat, or a species being pushed toward its own ecological limits. For now, the song still rises predictably from the same ground. Whether that holds depends on what happens to the soil beneath it.