It's been a cool May in these parts, and the arrival of the 17 year cicadas was so delayed that many folks who were either too young or too far away to recall 2004 were beginning to doubt that anything out of the ordinary involving large, flying insects was actually going to happen. "I just don't believe it," I heard from several, but after a week in the 80s and 90s, they understand the fuss. An eerie hum straight out of any UFO episode of vintage TV fills the air, and there are so many smushed cicadas all over the street and sidewalks, that it seems impossible that very many of the brood are fulfilling their life's purpose to get up a tree, mate, and lay some eggs. But that is the cicada's survival strategy: defeating predators and pavement with their sheer number. Even when the ground is littered with fallen members of the brood and every bird and squirrel and rat and whatnot has had its fill of protein-rich biomass, they keep coming, and hundreds of millions make it aloft and find an arboreal perch and a willing partner to spin the lifecycle wheel forward for another 17 years.
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