This time, when I went down to Jordan Lake it was at night, because I thought I might be able to see some moderately distant thunderstorms looking south. They had all petered out by the time I got there, and it was still World Snake Day, so I poked around briefly in the idle thought that a snake might be visible. I saw none, and indeed not much of anything, but walking along the water’s edge I heard a curious drilling-whining sound that I didn’t quite recognize, and it was coming from right in front of me. I paused and shone the headlamp around carefully, seeing nothing, and crept forward slowly while the penetrating sound was still being produced.
Now, I want to set the picture here, because I was walking on a sandy shore right at the damp line, and it was flat and featureless, the only thing that was not ‘sand’ was a small line of fine washout debris, dark fragments of old wood and lake reeds that were only slightly larger than the sand itself, driven in by the breeze coming off the lake, which was also causing tiny wavelets to splash right there. More like a painting, in other words, with just some dark stuff making more contrast than concealment, for anything. I was easily seeing small sand-colored spiders running along ahead of me from the shadows that they cast and the reflections of their eyes.
Eventually, I realized I was right on top of the producer of the sound, pinning it down to within a 20cm radius right at my feet – and still couldn’t see anything, nor did I disturb anything as I approached. The sound was piercing and very directional, so much so that a simple tilt of my head produced decibels of difference in either ear as I turned. I did a quick recording with my smutphone, but was without a decent mic and so this is only with the phone’s, and suffers from wind noise, distortion, and the sounds of the waves, as well as likely some dropoff from the mic not being sensitive enough in the outer ranges. But this was what I got:
Mysterious lakeside sound
If you have decent spread on your stereo speakers, or are using headphones, you can actually hear the sound traverse between ears as I tilted the phone, but for the full effect, kick the volume up until you’re wincing.
Finally, I settled on a little hollow at the debris line, perhaps a bit over a centimeter in diameter, what appeared to have been a burrow – nothing else was visible at all, and again, I’m now bent double right overhead and the sound still hasn’t ceased. It did immediately, though, as I touched the sand right behind the hollow, and so I quickly plunged my hand in far enough back and scooped up all of the sand that held the burrow.
Almost immediately I unearthed a small, strange grey critter than endeavored to rebury itself as soon as it was exposed, whose appearance brought an involuntary and out-loud, “What the fuck are you?” from me – it resembled nothing more than a small squid, which might have been okay if this were oceanside, but not from a freshwater lake in the middle of North Carolina. I also felt it attempting to dig past the sand and down through my fingers, so I dropped it and kept exposing it as it tried to hide. The camera sling bag was on my back and I knew I had to get pics, because after a moment I recognized it as a species that I’ve only seen once and didn’t get very good photos of then. What followed was a lot of thigh-slapping and hand-rubbing as I attempted to rid my hands of all vestiges of damp sand before handling the camera. No macro lens or flash rig, so I had to rely on the on-camera flash and the 18-135 lens, but eventually I got a decent enough frame of it.
This is likely a tawny mole cricket (Neoscapteriscus vicinus,) which the sound should have helped me out with (indeed, I felt it was either a cricket or a chorus frog species, but it was different enough and piercing enough that it didn’t seem like either.) At roughly 30mm in length it was nearly double the size of a typical cricket, and as it burrowed it simply trailed those hind legs behind it as it dug with its wicked front legs – that large thorax head shield and the trailing legs, never seen clearly due to the movement, certainly looked a hell of a lot like a squid.
I screwed up here too, in that I somehow felt I had nothing to carry it home within even though I’d just removed the camera from the bag that always has a few empty film cans in it for exactly this kind of opportunity – when they’re not actually holding fishhooks from irresponsible fishermen (which is, to all appearances, redundant.) So I did a few frames until i knew I had a decent shot and simply let the cricket be and walked on, when I could easily have brought it back to do quite detailed shots in a studio setting, especially of those front legs. Silly me.