Cicada
In the dog days of summer, you hear this awesomely loud buzzing in the trees...
When I was a child, and the first cicadas began to sing their screeching mating tunes. Mom always said, six weeks 'til frost. That's about right in the northern tier of US states, but not true further south. When you hear them sing, start looking for these shells on the tree trunks, and other places that must be climbed....
It's just a dead, empty shell, but it is evidence of the cicada the night before, when it had to crawl out, eyes, wings, legs and all. How did it do such a thing?
I don't really know, but I do know I'm going to leave behind my empty shell someday to go on to bigger and better things. That's what the Bible tells me.
Once we saw a cicada starting to split, and it fell off the tree trunk. The flashlight batteries were getting weak, so I went for some fresh ones, so we could search on the ground. When we returned, it was right there, but hundreds of fire ants were rending the helpless cicada limb from limb. As grandpa would have said, "It died a-borning."