The 17-year cicadas emerged once again this year in northern Illinois (while a 13-year brood emerged to the south), and I traveled to see and hear them.
“Ick, insects?” I know, they are pretty big, with buzzing wings and large red eyes. But why not spend nine minutes hearing about them anyway — and see if you can sense some of the wonder in this regular, but infrequent, natural phenomenon.
Listen on Podbean:
Listen on YouTube:
A few resources:
Illinois Cicada Watch (Facebook group)
Insectophilia (insects in Japanese culture, with the Haiku I read)
Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0
Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):
Welcome to Nine Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world.
If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.
[cicada sounds]
That is the mating song of thousands of male 17-year periodical cicadas singing in the trees near Chicago just a couple weeks ago. It’s June 2024, and 17 years ago these cicadas were tiny little nymphs the size of rice burrowed underground, and they sucked on tree roots for 17 years and came up in late May, starting in late May of this year.
They last about four to six weeks, and then they die, and their whole purpose when they’re up now for these four to six weeks is to mate and create eggs that the females will deposit in little slits that they make in the tree branches. And a couple months later, the larva will fall to the ground, and apparently they look like little grains of rice with legs, and they fall to the ground, burrow again into the ground, and suck on the sap that comes from the tree roots for 17 years — and then they’ll reappear.
So this is a marvelous example of a natural cycle that I just find incredible, and I traveled all the way to Chicago to see my mom but also to see the cicadas at this time. I probably would have visited my mom a different time if it hadn’t been for them.
So what comes to your mind when you think about insects? What is your relationship with insects? There’s a very good probability that if you live in the city or in the suburbs, all of your experiences or most of your experiences, with insects are negative, and the messages you receive around insects are negative and bad and they’re pests, right? We see examples all over the place. I was walking on the beach of Lake Michigan just last week, and a young woman was walking with another woman and she came across a dead cicada. I know it was dead because it was not moving, and it was being tossed around by the waves and she just freaked out.
She said something like “aaaaarrrrrrrrrr” and she flipped out, even though there are thousands of them all over. This is kind of a visceral reaction that many of us have to insects. I’ll talk about that more in a little while because it is understandable.
I’m in a Facebook group called Illinois Cicada Watch, and they did a poll recently asking people whether they were inundated with cicadas and loving it, inundated with cicadas and can’t wait till they’re gone, had no cicadas and are okay with that, or had no cicadas and that was making them sad — and 40% of people said “we’re inundated with cicadas where I live and we’re loving it.” Of course, that’s the main group of people who are also going to this Facebook page Illinois Cicada Watch, but I definitely am in that first group. As I mentioned, I traveled there for that purpose primarily, in addition to seeing my mom (I love you mom!), and I’m fascinated by their amazing life cycle which I’ve told you a little bit about.
Also, at the end of their life cycle when they all end up on the ground and it doesn’t smell very nice — last time it happened 17 years ago we had to take snow shovels and shovel them into a big pile in the street, I think, and then the town came and did something with them, composted them I guess, but they renew the soil in the forests and other animals feed on them, sometimes too much like, I hear the veterinarians are inundated with sick dogs because they’ve been eating too many cicadas and also that birds can die if they eat too many — not because the cicadas make them sick per se but because they are no longer eating things that have enough vitamins. Apparently cicadas don’t have any vitamin A. And some people do eat cicadas, so if you decide to eat them this season, uh, just you know, eat your carrots as well.
So I see all this as a big treat, and it was really magnificent. I wanted to be around them all the time. I observed most of their activities. I saw them flying around, climbing up tree trunks, mating, looking for trees to climb, crashing into things, struggling on the ground upside down, and sometimes just often sitting placidly in the trees, and I developed this empathy for them, like each one has had this 17 years of what sounds kind of like a boring life underground (of course that’s totally anthropomorphizing), but they’ve made it this far, right, and then they’ve come up and they deserve a chance. So I actually rescued a bunch of them. They’re easy to rescue if they’re flailing upside down on the ground and their little legs are kicking, and you can put a stick down and they’ll grab onto it or a pen, or it could be your finger if you don’t mind, and they’ll grab onto it with their little legs. And then you could just take it over to a tree and they’ll immediately start climbing up the tree because that’s what they do — they emerge right under the tree and climb up to the top, and that’s where they’re looking for their mates.
So again you might be thinking, “Oh my god, gross, ick, insects are gross, why the hell am I spending nine minutes listening to somebody talk about insects?” And I get it. Scientists actually believe there is an evolutionary reason why people have a natural aversion to insects, because some of them are poisonous, some of them can make us sick, so there’s a reason for it. And there’s also an aversion to things that startle us, and insects have a special way of doing that especially if they have wings. Even though I love the cicadas, if one would fly right into me quickly I would jump, because that is an ingrained aversion.
But I was also reading about whether there is a cultural aversion, and I really believe that there is. I don’t think I was startled by insects very much until I was told that I was supposed to be, and my dad — he just hated spiders and insects anything like that, snakes, he hated them too — and I think I learned some things from him like “Oh wait, I’m supposed to act like that, I’m supposed to go ‘ah’ every time I see a spider.” So there was a period in my life when I did that, and then I realized, “Well that’s kind of silly.” I got over that to a large degree depending on whether they startle me or whether I’m prepared to see them.
I found an article about Japanese culture, which has a greater acceptance of insects traditionally than western cultures, including many references to insects in traditional poetry and literature. I love this by the 18th-century haiku poet Kobayashi Isa: “Autumn cicada/flat on his back/chirps his last song.”
And, by the way, there will be autumn cicadas this year, because the ones I’ve been talking about are the periodical ones who come out every 17 years or every 13 years, but in many parts of the world cicadas also come out every year, and they look different. They’re different types. So if you live in a place where you have not seen the periodical cicadas this year, don’t fear, you’ll get to see or at least hear some annual cicadas.
I’ll leave you with a few more thoughts about why I found this particular cicada emergence so awe-inspiring. Their life cycle is really different from ours, obviously and thankfully, but it still mirrors the cycle of birth, life, death, and generations carrying on repeatedly over eons, and when I thought about that, I thought, well, theirs is 17 years, ours is longer than that hopefully, but we have a cycle like that as well.
And the cicadas also really represent a benchmark for our lives if we grew up or have ever lived in the same places where they do. So for those of us who grew up in places where we have these 17-year broods, we remember where we were 17 years ago. And I remember when I was five years old they came up then, and my memory of that is kind of fuzzy of course because I was five, but I do have some recollections of it. And I remember 17 years ago when my niece was a little girl and we were out in the backyard, my parents’ backyard, and it was so loud. When they’re in the trees, they’re so loud you can hardly talk to each other and hear each other, and I remember that really well. 17 years and now she’s in her 20s and they’re back, and of course we think about what our lives will be like or whether we’ll even be alive 17 years from now when the babies of today’s cicadas resurface in 2041.
So look and listen for cicadas and other chirping insects wherever you live, and again it’s just about time for the annual cicadas to come out, so listen for them. And hopefully you’re not creeped out by what I’ve told you, but hopefully you’re more curious, so please look up some photos and don’t freak out — they’re really beautiful creatures, very, very interesting. I’ll leave you with that and talk to you soon!