They’re coming, so have fun.
This is a big deal. Brood XIII cicadas and Brood XIX cicadas, the 17-year and 13-year models, are squeezing out of the ground together for the first time since 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was president.
They won’t hatch together again in Illinois until 2245, when we’ll all likely be robots or clones of Elon Musk.
So enjoy the summer of 2024 with these bug-eyed bugs.
They can’t bite, can’t sting, can’t run (they can crawl a bit), can’t fly well, can’t harm pets (unless the pets insanely gorge on them), can’t eat anything (they may sip some liquids). In fact, they really can’t do much at all during their brief above-ground stay on Earth — except, man, can they holler.
The racket the males make by using drum-like timbals on their abdomens to attract females (naturally) can be as loud as a lawn mower or passing jet.
All you old folks who’ve gone half-deaf from blasting Metallica or you kids who play Taylor Swift and Beyonce at level 10 on continuous loops in your earbuds, here’s a chance to hear nature responding.
Match this, Dave Grohl!
But we’re talking about good times, or, as the Cat in the Hat put it, ‘‘lots of good fun that is funny.’’
Here’s one: You can eat cicadas.
I have a friend who ate one years ago, must have been 17 years ago — breaded, fried and salted, as I recall. He said it was OK, kind of like tofu or thereabouts. According to one of the many website recipes for cicada cooking, they have a ‘‘nutty flavor with a nice crunch.’’
One site said it had ‘‘a taste and texture similar to the crustaceans.’’ Dirt shrimp, then.
Of course, if you want a true shrimp taste, capture a bunch of woodlice in your backyard leaf pile — pill bugs or roly-polies, as kids call them — and boil ’em up. They’re actually not insects but terrestrial crustaceans. Yum.
Back to cicadas. After you eat one, please write me and tell me how it went. It’s called entomophagy, the practice of eating insects. I’m curious.
And don’t worry about depleting the supply of these creatures. It’s estimated there might be as many as a trillion cicadas all birthed to daylight this summer.
And what a Darwinian survival technique they have mastered: come out in such massive numbers at such unusual intervals that no predator could possibly evolve in similar fashion. So, again, dig in. Lots of protein and minerals there. They say.
Another thing you can do is play cicada badminton.
I have done this. It was maybe three cicada birthdays ago, and some friends and I were playing in July on a cheap net in the side yard near lots of trees. Cicadas were deafening and staggering about, spewing their pickup lines endlessly. Somebody grabbed one and we started swatting it back and forth over the net. They’re fairly aerodynamic. Decent shuttlecocks. When you lose one, grab a spare.
Beyond that, simply collecting a bunch of loud ones, putting them in a cigar box or paper bag and scaring the bejeezus out of sensitive, unsuspecting folks can be amusing. I opened a box of them one time before a ‘‘Sportswriters on TV’’ show, and we had to scrape cigar-chomping moderator Ben Bentley off the wallpaper in the back room.
Then there’s art.
This is truly fun. Since the cicadas basically erupt from their shells, sing, mate (the females then lay eggs in low tree branches) and die (a country-and-western singer’s perfect arc?), it’s easy to collect deceased ones. Once you have a bunch, pin them on a Styrofoam spreading board (simple to make), straighten their four gossamer wings, dry them as you would a butterfly and, man, the canvases that result.
Use water-based acrylic paint, little stars, numbers, dots, glitter, whatever seems right, and decorate away.
I have made a few wall displays this way, on colorful backgrounds, sometimes with characters speaking from cartoon bubbles. I’ve made bombers, zebras, pinwheels, clowns. The cicadas I mostly used were ‘‘Dog-day cicadas,’’ the ones that come out regularly in small numbers, not the periodical cicadas we’ll soon be enjoying.
What a blessing this new supply will be.
Why, if you’ve got a steady hand, you can even paint live cicadas and release them like flying monkeys or house pets.
The bugs also can be made into mobiles, brooches, hairpins, cocktail umbrellas.
We’ll get to that 13 or 17 years from now.
