They're Coming
You won’t be able to miss them. They’re in the news, on social media, and everyone is talking about them. Some will cringe in horror while ugly screaming and others are planning their encounters with rapt fascination.
Brood X, I’m talking about you.
Annual events are humdrum, expected as usual. Even the four-year Olympic cycle appears short in comparison to the lifecycle of periodical cicadas. I’ve heard the analogy of their arrival to signs of end times and judgements in assorted religious texts as they are arriving in the midst of a plague, but cicadas are not locusts. That would be like calling sheep goats. It’s apples and oranges so please don’t perpetuate the ignorance.
What is Brood X and why all the hoopla?
According to the USDA Forest Service, there are 17 active broods of periodical cicadas in the eastern United States. A brood is a geographical designation combined with the year that group emerges from either a 13- or 17-year lifecycle, most of it spent underground. Brood X, which last emerged in 2004, is found throughout 15 states and is one of the most prominent due to its size.
Excitement is building because soon trillions of red-eyed, black flying insects will be swarming from here as far out across the country as Illinois with a collective buzzing as loud as a leaf blower. Be fortunate it’s only the males who sing or the cacophony would be twice as loud.
Here’s the good news. Unlike locust (aka: grasshoppers), the cicadas aren’t out to ravenously consume all vegetation in their path. Last summer when there was an inordinate swarm of grasshoppers they decimated my garden and porch plants, even gnawing my succulents down to oozing stubs. The free-ranging poultry were quite happy. I was not.
Cicadas, on the other hand, have been slowly sipping on tree xylem (the tissue that transports water and nutrients from roots to leaves) for years. Those party animals are only interested in one thing once they hit the surface—S E X! Until mid-July we will be living amidst one big bug orgy. That will be good for my petunias and the chickens will still get a treat. Additionally, cicadas also do not sting, bite, or transmit diseases as do other nuisance insects like mosquitoes and ticks.
I would be remiss if I did not also mention they are somewhat of a periodical delicacy as well. Yuck! you say? Well, do you eat shrimp, lobsters, and crabs? Yes, they too are bugs and just like the softshell Blue crabs you get at the farmers market, gourmands search out the succulent cicadas fresh from their shell. It takes about a hour before they are able to fly making them easy to collect. Think of them as “tree shrimp.”
Being in the food industry, it’s easy to see why eating them would be first on my mind. As a farmer, however, many of my friends are biologists, naturalists, and regenerative agrarians so when a pair of cicada earrings showed up at my door for “something to wear to market” I swooned. And I’m not the only one getting in on the act. One of Central Farm Markets long-time customers showed up on Sunday with her tee shirt from the last emergence. Once the bugs start singing, I’ll enjoy my morning coffee to their serenade with Brewed X.
