Those Noisy, Pesky, Horny Cicadas

May 2013 

I’m sitting in my sunroom on a warm afternoon, looking out across my newly green backyard and the ravine that cuts through our neighborhood. I’m awaiting, with a creeping sense of dread and resignation, a benign but loud invasion. 

The 17-year periodical cicadas (Brood II) are due to crawl up from underground around these parts, as soon as the ground temperature hits and maintains 64 degrees. 

Soon. 

A few precocious cicadas emerged in the past couple of summers, much to the evil delight of our cats, who regarded them as toys to be brought inside and batted about. 

I know many people look forward to the cicadas. And I know they’re essentially harmless. (Even delicious, some say.) 

I certainly don’t regard them the same way I regard, say, roaches or spiders or ants. 

But that doesn’t mean I have to like them. 

Cicadas are often mistakenly called locusts – but really, they’re not even crickets. They don’t fly much, and certainly not in dark, menacing swarms. They are closer to leafhoppers and spittle bugs, huge but harmless, hanging out on your lawn, your deck, your patio … pretty much any surface offered them. 

They are most famous for having the loudest “song” in all of Bug Land. It’s not really a song, or even remotely melodic. It’s more like a ringing in your ears, only louder. A lot louder. Think back to that vuvuzela craze a few years ago. Add steroids. 

The species in our neighborhood – Magicicada, which also comes in 13-year broods elsewhere – covers a swath that starts in central North Carolina and extends northeastward up into Connecticut and eastern New York. They last appeared in 1996. Any day now, the cicadas born that year will venture into the sunlight in bugly hordes, having spent their youth deep in the earth, sucking down the root juice that grows them into cuddly cicada nymphs who will emerge from the ground and quickly morph into teenage mutant grasshopper cousins the size of your grandfather’s schnoz. 

Aboveground, they will eat like they did below: by sticking their proboscis into plant stems to get to the sap. This gives them their only means of hurting humans – inadvertently – should they mistake you for a plant and try to jab you for some of your root juice. (As for the plants, you might consider netting your ornamental trees and bushes, and wrapping the trunks of your young trees with foil to keep the bugs from crawling on them.) 

The cicadas will also molt. Maybe this is because it will be summer, and it will be hot, and besides, that’s what some insects do. Plus, being teenagers, they will be madly horny and ready to hook up. Like cinematic lovers in heat, they will lustily shed their skins and drop them wherever they may be – the insect equivalent of inside-out blue jeans and crumpled bras and undies littering the floor of a cheap hotel room. 

And they will mate: anywhere, everywhere. It’s impossible not to see them getting their buggy freak on. You’ll look away from one pair amorously entwined in the crotch of the big maple tree, only to find your garden gnomes leering at another couple in flagrante under the tomato plants. 

The ladies, after calming down, will cut slits into the bark of tree branches and deposit their newly fertilized eggs there. When the eggs hatch, the infant nymphs will drop to the ground and burrow in to begin the cycle anew. 

Their parents – empty-nesters already, without so much as having changed a diaper – will then complete the Circle of Life by carpeting your patio and yard with their prune-sized corpses. The last time around, I couldn’t walk outside without having to either sweep away the cicada cadavers or just ignore the constant crunching underfoot. 

But the real highlight of the cicadas’ pilgrimage to the Land Above is the noise. 

Because while the cicadas live, they chirp. Or sing, or screech, or shriek. Whatever. As their serenade continues, you’ll find yourself reaching for verbs more commonly associated with mental imbalance and homicidal rage. 

Not surprisingly, it’s only the males making the noise. They might be sending out mating calls, to which a female might respond with a flick of her wings. Or they might be signaling their displeasure over, say, the clumsy touch of a curious human or a bored cat. 

Maybe they’re talking baseball, or telling off-color jokes about cockroaches. 

Personally, I think they’re quoting Bill Murray from “Ghostbusters” as he diddles the highest keys on a piano: “They hate this.” 

Rather than rub his legs (or other body parts) together like his cricket cousins, the cicada uses abdominal membranes called tymbals, rapidly snapping them back and forth like a kid’s toy clicker. A hollow body chamber acts as an amplifier. 

Different species have distinctive sounds, but generally speaking, a single cicada sounds something like a pair of maracas. 

A whole chorus of cicadas? Imagine thousands of people shaking those maracas as they zip down a cobblestone street on roller skates after guzzling several triple-shot espressos. 

The cicadas will chitter and chatter. All day long, all summer long. 

It’s a magical sound. Eerily, Hitchcockily magical. 

Not a plague of locusts, precisely. But by midsummer, I’m not sure which of the two I might prefer. 

Text Copyright © 2013 by Robert S. Thurston. Linked images belong to their respective owners. I will gladly remove links at the owners' request.