Cicadas! May 28, 2008
This is a cicada year for us. Our little town is getting hit harder than a few years ago when another large cicada brood hatched. We have LOTS of cicadas in our yard. Every morning I find that more have crawled out of the ground, climbed up the side of my house, shed their skins, and are creepily sitting on my house. Ewww! I have to go outside regularly and knock them off everything: the house, our patio furniture, the kids toys, the swing set, etc. I would NOT recommend walking outside without shoes on these days. That is, unless you enjoy having live cicadas squished between your toes. Um, yeah. They should be done doing their cicada breeding thing and die off or be eaten up by July, so I hear. In the mean time our back yard is very educational, in the bug department.
In case you aren’t familiar with what a cicada looks like, here are some lovely pics:
Here is a cicada skin after one has climbed out of it. The old skins cling to everything.
One sitting on our back steps.
A cicada on my kids’ slide.
Another one on the slide. Note the bulging red eyes of doom. I’d also like to note that cicadas seem kind of dumb. I guess bugs aren’t really known for their intelligence, but these bugs seem particularly slow witted. They just sit there. They don’t do much of anything. They even fly kind of slowly. If they get knocked over they flutter around on their backs and can’t seem to turn themselves over. Dan commented that I might be kind of slow witted too if I’d been asleep under the ground for the last 17 years. Good point honey. Stupid groggy bugs!
it is not fair that you have then already but we don’t. Monday all day and into the evening there were a bunch of guys on Mariemont Square collecting them. John said it was probbly someone doing research, but I had to remind him that the guys collecting them look too redneckie to be doing research, that is when he remembered that Snappy Tomato Pizza has a Cicada Pizza last time they were out. YUCK!!!!!
BTW, Happy Birthday.
i hate to sound stereotypically girly, but euwwwwww. I hate bugs.
There are many things I miss about Cincinnati. Cicadas are not on the list.
I miss the cicadas. I love the irony of the dead ones in the road. poor frustrated boy cicada lives underground for 17 years and comes up for one reason: to find a beautiful girl cicada to have and to hold. He climbs up a tree and listens–lo–the lovely singing of his prospective mate in a tree across the road. So he spreads his wings, takes flight, his hopes and dreams about to become a reality when. . . Whoosh–thump—Carolyn has smashed it with her car, leaving little boy cicada to contemplate the pointlessness of his existence. Is this a metaphor for life?
Too funny! It’s true though. What is the point of those cicadas living such unnaturally long bug lives under the ground? I’ve seen many that shed their skins just to be deformed and can’t fly. Or they die in the shedding process. Or they get smashed up by cars or my kids. That’s a long time to live safely under ground just to come out and die in two seconds. Weird creatures.