The Red-eyes are Coming!

I believe that the long duration of the emergence is due to the notion of predator satiation, so the vulnerable insects leave some survivors. The notion is that as both 13 and 17 are prime numbers, no predator could synchronize with them with a shorter breeding period.

In 1970 I was in the Navy and stationed in Washington D.C. They were everywhere.

They get buzzed before mating, also college student like.

Will increasing C02 make them worse or cycle more often? Will it be worse than we thought? How in the hell does someone know that they live in the ground for 17 years!?

I lived in Maryland in 1970 (?) when the 17th year hit. The one thing I remember is that it was the only year that our cherry tree had cherries that survived to ripen. Either the birds ate the cicadas instead of the cherries or the cicadas scared the birds away from the tree.

The Chicago area brood is not due until 2024.

Fond childhood memories, accompanied by the sounds of gentle Cicadas.

Have never experienced this in the USA but i did in Australia in 2004, hiking through a forested park. The sound traveled in waves, passing over me and then returning, back and forth like waves in the ocean.

that was the least annoying thing that day, i brushed up against what looked like a poplar tree leaf, arm burned for about an hour, then every time i touched it, it started to burn again.

Australia is lots of fun

The World Health Organization (WHO) today declared “climate delusion” a pandemic. The Secretary General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (Ethiopia) said at the headquarters of the UN sub-organization in Geneva at a virtual press conference that the disease has spread worldwide in a frightening manner and must finally be stopped in order to prevent greater damage to humanity.

Above all younger humans – and here particularly the female sex – are physically and psychologically among other things by the “Greta syndrome” recognizably highly contagious. This is characterized by a tendency to skip school and to see the vital trace gas “CO2” in the air, which is not possible for healthy people.

Those who regularly attend school and understand the content of chemistry and biology, for example, know that CO2, in combination with sunlight and water, is essential for plants to grow and produce oxygen for animals and humans.

The secretary-general went on to say that the WHO is allocating $5 billion worldwide to research and provide vaccines against “climate madness,” which is similar to “mad cow disease,” in which animals’ brains regress like sponges.

As a first precautionary measure, people in organizations should be put under quarantine who call the vital CO2 a “climate killer” and publicly claim that the earth, which has been cooling for 8000 years, would “heat up” due to the trace gas and that snowfalls and frost would soon no longer exist in the middle latitudes of the earth….

The Secretary General called for the immediate dissolution of the falsely named “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” (IPCC), a sub-organization of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which has been identified as the original source of climate delusion.

According to the Secretary General, in Germany it is above all the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), the Federal Environment Agency and the German Weather Service (DWD) that are affected. These organizations, which are completely contaminated by “climate delusion,” should be closed immediately and all employees should be placed in permanent isolation until a negative test is available.

The Secretary General expressed his regret that the press conference could only take place virtually. But especially many editorial offices of the mainstream are already also contaminated by the “climate delusion”, as can be seen from the many false reports, which hardly give space to the sun as the dominant energy donor and the oceans as overpowering energy stores as the main driver of weather and climate.
Many journalists should therefore be regarded as highly contagious “superspreaders” and immediately isolated from healthy people.

German Source

We had them at our Chatahoochee National forest inholding north Georgia cabin near Lake Blue Ridge in 2004. Really noisy. We will have them again in June. They are edible, and this year I may try a few recipes if we are able to get up during the emergence. My daughter ate them in China during her pre senior summer there (she majored in Chinese) and says they are quite good.

They are VERY highly local. I remember a few years where one grove of trees would be totally silent, while the next was too loud to bear.
Gotta keep the dogs away from them though. They can’t digest part of them (the wings I think) and they’ll block up their tummy. Plus, cicada breath isn’t a fun thing to smell.

Southern France (Provence) cicades, without them, it’s not Provence 😀

7.Should I hit them with a flamethrower? Yes, especially if your trees are a little dry and located close to your neighbors house.

I remember them coming out in the Cincinnati area when I was a kid. (not sure which brood)
We’d put a bunch in a coffee can and stick it someone’s locker at school.
It also made for great fishing at a local pond. Anything that hit the water would get a strike, even a bare hook.
The only direct injury I’ve ever heard of was a picture of a kid in paper back then. A cicada mistook his forearm for a twig and tried to lay eggs in it. His forearm looked like Popeye’s. (Must have been an allergic reaction.)
Some indirect injuries may have occurred from car accidents. The roads can get slick after several thousand are run over.

PS I remember a TV show (History Channel?) saying that when they come out in the Cincinnati area, it is the largest insect swarm in the world.

We don’t have anything like this in England.
But thanks to today’s very warm weather it was nice to hear the buzz of bumble bees and see butterflies feeding on flowers as l went for a walk in the country in March.

Will this be added to list of increased risk from global warming for the insurance industry, Wall Street, and the Federal Reserve (SF)? Or will be it added to the reasons for stimulus No. 9–The American Bug Rescue Plan?

Not exactly locusts but close enough for climate change media consultants and assorted scare tactics. The NYT and CNN viewers won’t now the difference. NPR can find and interview an expert at a university to confirm it.

This is what the LORD, the God of the Hebrews, says: ‘How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me? Let my people go, so that they may worship me. If you refuse to let them go, I will bring locusts into your country tomorrow. They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen. They will devour what little you have left after the hail, including every tree that is growing in your fields. They will fill your houses and those of all your officials and all the Egyptians—something neither your fathers nor your forefathers have ever seen from the day they settled in this land till now.
— Exodus 10:3–6

In Colorado Springs we don’t have any cicadas. But to the north of us, in the Black Forest (not Germany), they do. But those cicadas are a different species, much smaller than the ones I’m acquainted with from back east.

Holy Cow
Finally, But maybe not

Going back to year 2005 or 2006, while I was s cow farmer in the very North East corner of Cumbria. Actually a mile north of the line of Hadrian’s Wall.

It was summer and as cow farmers do, we ‘follow the sun’.
When it rises, so do we.
So, about 4 or 5 in the morning, starting to get light (nautical twilight?) I found myself heading from bed towards the kitchen looking for a drink. Sometimes water or sometimes coffee. Coffee helps me sleep, it really does.

Passing through the hallway and past my clear glass-panelled front door there was this huuuuuge flying thing hovering outside.
About 3 foot off the ground and 6″ away from the glass, it looking in at me looking out looking at it.
And it just stayed there hovering. The pair of us just froze, who got the bigger shock?

Took me a good few moments to realise, I should go get a camera.
I did but inside the 15 seconds it took, ‘thing’ had gone.

But it was bigger than described here – I had a direct comparison with ‘something’
i.e. To pretty up my garden I’d just recently got THE most garish piece of tasteless plastic tat, nominally a dragonfly, to brighten the place up a bit.

Fluorescent green with a fat body and 4 transparent green wings fixed on springs – so it ‘flew’ when the wind blew. It was about 6 inches square and was planted, via an oversize welding rod, in a flower pot on my doorstep.
Directly beside/below this flying monster bug thing.

They could have been twins – it was that big. Six inch wings easily and it was fat. Maybe about 5 inches long. Hovered perfectly in front of the glass.

So, what was it?
I puzzled and puzzled. Got nowhere.
Interweb was useless at the time but I didn’t know what to search for.
My only idea, from where I’ve no idea, was that it was ‘something’ that did what Cicadas do.
i.e. Live in the ground for years and then emerge.
Plenty things that do that, especially ‘Leather Jackets’ turning into ‘Daddy Long Legs’
They’re a real pest for folks who grow grasses of any/most variety. They eat the roots.

Anybody everybody I told or asked them about thought I was nuts.

So did I see a Cumbrian Cicada? Do such things exist?
It wasn’t singing but I suppose, it was strictly still night-time, or very early morn. i.e. cold

Quote: “”New Forest cicada is the only cicada native to the UK“”
here
And even then, from the link
Quote:””It is one of the UK’s largest insects sizing up to an impressive 3cm in length“”
The thing that visited me was nearly twice that many inches long

I can still picture it like it happened yesterday, it really was just ‘something else’
I do genuinely wonder what became of it, did it come to ‘be friends’ with my green plastic dragonfly? That’s the only thing that makes any sense

And now 15 years down the line and with the ‘Emotionalism’ that comes from being a Stroke Survivor, I feel really sad about it.
I hope it was OK after it came see me.

A few years back one of these (similar) critters crawled up the tree outside of our kitchen window So I coaxed it onto a chunk of firewood & took it inside and got some photos as it crawled out of its skin and pumped its wings open. Took about an hour.

Where I grew up, there were two or three cicada emergences while I was in my single digit years.

The neighborhood kids, myself included, would each catch one and tie a 3′ to 4′ length of sewing thread around their abdomen.

Then we’d fly them like control-line airplanes. They fly ’round and ’round quite nicely.

I grew up poor (didn’t know it, though). We had to make most of our own toys.

Here in Northern Virginia, we have something called the bot fly. Describing its life cycle is tricky, since it has no apparent beginning or end. But here goes, anyway.

The adult bot fly does only one thing: it goes around laying eggs on the ground. It doesn’t eat anything, because it has no mouth. As a result, it dies in about 5 days.

Nearly a year passes, and then (in our area) squirrels foraging for food inhale and swallow some of these eggs. The eggs hatch into larvae, which then burrow through the living flesh of the squirrel to settle in the shoulder region. They eat what they need to transform into the bot fly, then, in Alien fashion, explode through the squirrel’s skin, and fly away like some huge, malignant bumblebee. The squirrel population appears horribly mangled in late August and early September, but they mostly recover. In the meantime, these hideous flies go around laying the eggs for next year, then die.

In the 1960s, there was a toy called The Useless Box. It was a box with a lever on top. One would throw the lever, and the box would begin to vibrate and sway, making ominous rumbling sounds, until suddenly a trapdoor on the top opened, and a mechanical hand reached out and switched the lever off before withdrawing back into the box. That’s the human analog of the bot fly, IMHO.

Nature may be wonderful, but she’s also kind of odd a lot of the time.

Some good information and maps at UConn’s Cicadas site. For some fun, here’s the Cicada Mania blog.

I remember the last two emergences here both very noisy! They even have had a song written about them: ‘Day of the Locust’ by Bob Dylan.

Don’t forget the key talking points

• Global Warming
• It might be worse then we thought, and
• It may already be too late

Also

• Please give us grant money.

😀

I remember the first time I ever saw a cicada emergence – I am guessing it was 1978 or 79 and I was living in central Maryland at the time. I went around with an old coffee can and picked up all the shed skins I could find, which were quite numerous on tree trunks. I must have kept about three dozen, and to this day I still have them (though not in the same coffee can). I also saved some from the 2004 brood, while also living here in Maryland. Not sure how many to expect where I live now (same county as 04′ but about 15 minutes away) as I’ve only lived here for about 5 years. We have lots of woods and trees so there may be a fair number.

Thanks for another interesting post, Kip. I am wondering about the maturation cycles (17, 13 and 1 year) you mentioned. When I was visiting Springfield, Missouri, on work assignment several years ago, the cicadas were out. Being from Vancouver, BC, I’d never heard them before and asked the friendly hotel staff about the interesting sounding insects. I was told they came there on a two year cycle, so I was lucky. Does the two year explanation sound correct? Just curious.

Thanks!

badEnglish

Hey!
You didn’t explain how climate change will.make things worse!

like the bamboos that all flower globally every 100 yrs or so
and the jade plants that I have seen flower only once in my 60+yrs as well

In 1970’s Brood X outbreak, our house was the epicenter of the Brood X with dead cicada shells 6 inches under an old oak tree. During the latest outburst, 17 years ago, a dear friend visited us in the early evening mentioning how beautiful the flowers were and what kind of flower are they? (Cicadas are stark white after molting). So I gave her a pair of clippers to cut a few. The resounding shriek was not unexpected. She is still a friend thank goodness.

I thought it was 7 years? Is there a species that has a 7 year cycle?

I remember about 7 or 8 years ago the cicada noise here in NC, I’ve been expecting them again this year.

I have lost my upper register of hearing…I hardly hear the ones around here anymore. In fact did not hear them at all last summer. I live in MN. They are a higher pitched cicada around here compared to other parts of the country where I have witnessed them being more of a ‘scratching, buzz’ rather than the high pitched buzz they do around these parts. I do love the sound, at least occasionally as they bring back fond memories of summer. When I was a kid, we were told it was the ‘wire’s buzzing on hot days! lol.

I Love to hear them when I am outside. They are natures symphony to me. But not so much on the road. A few years ago I ran into a swarm on I-70 east of Washington, PA that actually caused a traffic backup. They were everywhere. I could hear them in the big truck even with the windows up and dozens of them bouncing onto my windshield. 

Other bugs that can cause a mess are the Love bugs down south and in Texas on I-35 south of San Antonio I ran into a mass movement of dragon flies that was so thick people were pulling over with overheated engines because the bugs had so clogged their radiators. Crickets also come in a swarm down that way sometimes.