17-Year Cicadas—Visitors from the Underground

“They sound like a chainsaw starting up,” is how my sister Joanne described the noise that the Brood X cicadas make in the woods near her family’s home. The 17-year cicadas have emerged from their underground dwellings, and are crawling up trees, shedding their nymphal skins, and filling the woods with the sound of their singing.

“Our dogs love to eat them,” my friend Linda said on Sunday evening. Linda and her husband also live in a wooded area, and she showed us pictures of her garden plants crawling with cicadas.

According to this article in Scientific America, Linda’s dogs aren’t that unusual— even housecats like to feast on this once-in-a-lifetime (for cats and dogs) treat. Some humans also are consuming them, according to this article from Forbes.

I have no desire to eat the Periodical Cicadas, but I did go to Middle Creek Wildlife Sanctuary (locally known as “The Project”) to get some pictures. Finding the cicadas was as easy as parking my car and walking to the nearest tree.

I walked a little further, into a meadow and took pictures of the cicadas emerging from their shells.

If you aren’t bugged out yet, you can watch this short video I made! (My first nature film ever). The video ends with the sound of the cicadas at night, excuse the occasional car, I was pulled over on the side of the road with my camera.

And if you are reading this soon after I post this (June 1, 2021), and live anywhere from northern Georgia to New York, (west to the Mississippi River and in the Midwest), you can go see and hear for yourself. Otherwise, the cicadas will be back in 2038.

“But ask the animals, and they will teach you,
    or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;
 or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,
    or let the fish in the sea inform you.
 Which of all these does not know
    that the hand of the Lord has done this?” — Job 12: 7-9.