The Screaming Forest

The trees are screaming outside my window as I write this.  It's not too bad, really - it actually fades into a kind of calming white noise after a little while.  Ok, so it's not the trees themselves that are making all of the ruckus.  It's what's in them, and I don't mean the leaves.  This is the year of Brood X, the largest concentration of the periodical cicada, making its emergence as it does every 17 years.  And boy do they make their presences known.

Cicadas are remarkably long-lived insects, but you wouldn't really notice because they spend almost all of their lives underground in their larval stage.  A few weeks ago, they clambered up to the surface, shed, and emerged as their winged adult form.  If you aren't a bug person, they can be a bit daunting, with their large size, blackish-green bodies, and bulbous red eyes.  They crawl all over the place, leaving the empty remnants of their exoskeletons behind them, and they tend to fly (poorly) all around us, which leads to some collisions.  I personally love seeing them, but I also know a lot of people who are repulsed by them.

You know who does love to see these guys?  All of the animals - both zoo and wild.  This is a sudden all-you-can-eat buffet of little winged beasties for a host of native wildlife, from copperheads to chipmunks (who, in turn, are also probably glad that the snakes have something else to eat this time of year instead of them).  I'm pretty sure I saw a mockingbird perched on a branch yesterday with its stuffed belly scraping the bark.  It looked like I feel after Thanksgiving dinner - a curious mixture of pleasure and self-loathing.

Our zoo animals love cicadas too.  Storks and cranes snap them up, smaller birds pursue any that are unwise enough to enter aviaries, foxes and meerkats pounce of them.  Reptile keepers gather them up to bring inside as a seasonal treat for herps.  For a short time only, it's cicadas for all.  I have one coworker who complained that taking her dog for a walk has become a nightmare chore - it takes a half hour to go to the end of the block and back, because the dog has to stop and eat every single cicada they meet on their way.  Even some people snack on them.

And soon, just like that, they'll be gone again, vanished for another generation.  I know I'll get used to it, but for a day or so afterwards, I know I'm going to be startled by just how silent the trees have all become.