A general reminder—periodic cicadas pose no threat to anyone and their plant damage is limited to nipping off the ends of twigs. Please do not hose them with pesticide. They are slow and clumsy and confused and only want to make friends with other cicadas and die of sexual exhaustion.
I grew up in the south and didn't know what a cicada sounded like until my 20s. Not that I never heard them, it was just that the sound was so omnipresent that I didn't realize that darkness doesn't naturally scream.
I grew up and went to college in the southeast, and you could always tell the students who didn't come from the South, because they'd flinch and stare when sun went down and the cicadas started up. I will never forget one girl--"so in summer and fall, the trees scream, and in spring, they flower?"
I went back to the South for a vacation one summer when a huge brood of cicadas was out. I heard the loud, alien sound that everyone was freaking out about and thought, "Ah, the sound of summer!"
I had been away for too long and had forgotten.
Within the last 35ish years? Memory is faulty but I have a weirdly good memory for natural stuff from my early childhood. I'd need to do a deeper dive to see exactly when. My sister used to torture me with the cicada shells. A caveat is I grew up in deep Queens
There was a tremendously large hatching in... 1987, I think? I remember my grandfather sweeping up piles of the exoskeletons like a foot high. They were supposed to be back in 2004, but there were barely any, and then in 2021 there were none.
I had a key to a room in an campus office building in the process of being gutted prior to extermination. I used it to finish my diss. That summer was one of the great cicada events in Indiana. The tree outside my window humming and shaking with cicada biomass got me through.
God this is so true, I just thought that was what "hot" sounded like, and the reason I didn't hear that sound in other places was because we never vacationed anywhere as hot as Texas.
The last time we had a big batch, they were a threat to our dog’s digestion…
We had to muzzle her outside to keep her from gorging on them until she made herself sick.
I have a friend who worked as a field researcher during a brood emergence in the 1980s. He concentrated on documenting how many/which birds were able to raise two egg clutches because of the abundance of food.
Same, my guy is bad w swallowing bees too.
So now I have do bee watch. He swallowed a queen couple years ago, it got him inside.
My female eats cicadas, which, I hate. They pile up in throat. She swallows whole. I designed a muzzle out of netting, cause I felt bad for her in regular kind.
Cicadas have a great evolutionary strategy, but they might be the dumbest, most oblivious creatures on the planet. They are big, slow, clumsy, have absolutely zero sense of self preservation beyond screaming "who wants to fuck" at the top of their lungs for pretty much their entire short existence.
