221 years of brooding
“This spring...up to a trillion cicadas will rise from the warming ground to molt, sing, mate, lay eggs and die.”
“I will bring locusts unto your country tomorrow.”
(Yes, I know locusts are not the same as cicadas, but an insect invasion is an insect invasion.)
I first learned of the coordinated emergence of two broods of cicadas—Brood XIII (13-year cicadas) and Brood XIX (17-year cicadas) in late January. I have been excitedly looking forward to the event ever since. It's not that I love cicadas—I suppose I am generally indifferent to them—but I love, Love, LOVE a spectacular-spectacular of (near) biblical porportions.
And I may have a penchant for signs of impending doom.
In April, The Great American Eclipse cut a swath of totality across most of the country, including downstate Illinois. Inexplicably, I did not pull my kids out of school, call off work, and drive a couple of hours south to see the full eclipse. I cannot comprehend what distorted idea of responsibility kept me from seeing the total solar eclipse. I guess I believed an almost total eclipse was enough.
The 95% coverage I saw in Chicago was cool, but nothing compared to what it is like to witness the sky going dark at midday. As solar physicist Ryan Mulligan writes in a guest essay for the New York Times:
A total solar eclipse is not something you see—it’s something that you experience. You can feel the temperature around you being to drip by as much as 15 degrees over the five to 10 minutes that lead up to the ecliplse. The birds and other animals go silent. The light becomes eerie and morphs into a dusky, muted twilight, and you begin to see stark, misplaced shadows abound. Sometimes, a few stars or planets begin to appear faintly in the sky as your eyes get used tothe new darkness.
The hairs stand up on the back of your neck and the adrenaline kicks in as your brain tries to make sense of what is going on. But it cannot.
I did not have 95% of that experience in April. I felt the temperature drop and saw a few curious shadows, but those subtle moments were overpowered by blaring Spotify playlist and line for snacks—one cookie only, the Sun Chips are all gone—at my school’s eclipse watching party.
Cicada Totality
Before the 2024 Great American Eclipse, there was the 2017 Great American Eclipse, which I wrote about here. Both of these were partial in Chicago and, interestingly, total a few hours south. The upcoming cicada invasion will follow the same pattern: partial in Chicago with just one brood hatching and total, with both hatching, a few hours south.
While different broods of cicadas emerge every few years—their background clicking and buzzing is a familiar hallmark of summer—they rarely appear in these numbers, and these two broods have not emerged together since 1803. I am not especially looking forward to the crunch of ghostly cicada molt and spent corpses under foot, but I am looking forward to weeks filled with their “incessant concerts…persisting from morning until night” as naturalist Harry A. Allard wrote in 1920 after the 1919 emergence of Brood X.
Around Chicago, young trees wrapped in gauze and tulle to protect their leaves from the hungry insects look like delicious cotton candy. Area restauranteurs are concocting menu items featuring deep fried and skewered cicadas. And some residents—including my neighbor—are planning 2020-style sheltering-in-place with windows closed and morning walks cancelled.
But the business of me is to witness and capture. And I cannot wait. I plan to spend the six weeks the cicadas are alive outside lavishing in the sound bath of cicada song 200 years in the making. From Harry A. Allard:
I felt a positive sadness when I realized that the great visitation was over, and there was silence in the world again, and all were dead that had so recently lived and filled the world with noise and movement.
It was almost a painful silence, and I could not but fell that I had lived to witness one of the great events of existence, comparable to the occurrences of a notable eclipse…”.
And, if I am lucky, a trillion cicadas might also block out the sun.
