Over the last three days, I have seen them with my own eyes. Mysterious troglodytes, quietly emerging from their secret places underground, creeping across the lawns and footpaths behind our place. First one, then a handful. Then there were many.
They have been gone for nearly two decades. But without warning, they have returned. They have missed the entire Obama administration. Smartphones. Social Media. But they have no use for these trivialities.
They are not human. Red-eyed and crawling, cold-blooded, single-minded.
They are heading for the woods, you see. Off of the grass, across the sidewalks and parking areas, hellbent on one goal: the trees.
And it is by their red eyes that I recognized them.
They are the ominously-named Brood X, the largest and densest periodical cicada brood in the world. They seek the trees because the nymphs need to climb up in order to split their skins and emerge as winged adult cicadas, to sing and mate and die in the world’s greatest orgy.
But they are wrong! Brood X, a 17-year cicada with the wonderful Latin name Magicicada septendecim, was last here in 2004, and is not due to emerge until 2021. So I was quite surprised to see them!
It turns out some cicada broods are famous for “stragglers,” cicadas who somehow got out-of-synch with their kind, and emerge on the wrong years: either one year early or late, or four years early or late. Brood X is known for the four-years-early stragglers. I didn’t know that until I did some research after seeing them:
Here’s a pretty good site: CicadaMania on Brood X stragglers.
So when walking my dog Luna around the lake every night this week, I’ve been picking up the little nymphs (they’re smaller than the black-eyed annual cicadas) and putting them on trees, because people are stepping on them. And that’s a shame.
Cicadas are utterly harmless – they do not bite humans or animals, they do not eat crops, they improve the health of the trees by aerating the soil, pruning weak branches, and of course littering the ground with their nitrogen-rich corpses by the billions. They are alien to us, but here in North America we are the aliens – the forest was theirs long before us. They live almost their entire lives below us and around us – in the billions – and we are unaware of them until the emergance.
And what an event that is! In four years, when the main brood emerges, it is one of the greatest spectacles in nature. Humans complain about their noise and their clumsy flight and their lifeless bodies afterwards, because any interruption of routine annoys us, and because so many of us hate to share our space with others, even if it’s only for a short time.
But they take my breath away. Here in heavily-developed suburban America, there is still an event with billions of wild animals, who for a few weeks sing and roar and party their lives away. You can’t ignore it. It’s an eye-and-ear-opening reminder that the natural world struggles to continue, despite our pavement and poisons and ceaseless attempts to dominate all life.
Come, little friends. There is room for you here. Rise again, sing on your sacred trees. Make love and babies. You do not know me and would not care, but that’s fine with me. Bring your wildness, your thunder, the thrumming heartbeat of the forest, that I may stand in wonder for a few days.
And if I am lucky, I will live to hear your children someday.
