You are the honored sweet prophet of summer for mortals. The Muses love you, and Apollo himself loves you, and gave you shrill song. Old age does not wear you down, wise one, earth-born one, lover of song. You cannot suffer, your flesh is bloodless, you are almost like the gods.
—Anacreontea 34. 10-181
Now that summer is slowly fading into autumn and the first cool days have finally arrived, I’m beginning to rejoice the slow disappearance of insects. I know every creature has its part to play in the ecosystem and blah, blah, blah, but anyone who lives on a farm or spends a lot of time outdoors also knows the misery that insects—especially ticks, flies, and mosquitoes—wreak on humans and animals. That’s not even getting into what pests do to crops and beehives. This year here in the Northeast has been especially unhappy due to the heatwave we suffered for most of the summer, which meant the horses—and especially the older animals with health issues like Cushing’s—really struggled.
In this part of the country, we were also subject to an infestation of Gypsy Moth caterpillars which decimated trees and plants in the area to a degree most locals had not seen in decades—perhaps not in their lifetimes. I vaguely remember a similar pestilence before moving here when I was a child, probably 30 years ago.
Spring was chaos around the farm, and I recognized the problem of the caterpillars too late to take action. By then, the damage was already done. For most of the spring and early summer, my apple trees were nude, blueberry bushes bare, and whole swathes of the forest on the hills above the farm appeared dead. They had feasted on everything green in sight, and everywhere one walked would result in being hijacked by furry, multi-legged passengers. Driving the tractor under trees in the field was the worst. Whole families of the creepy crawlies would descend on their silken strings, wrap around my face, and stick to my hat and shirt as I passed. It made for a disturbing few hours of mowing, to say the least.
An arborist told me that if they had come in another wave, the trees would all likely die, but if they were done with their assault, they should recover. Miraculously, most trees recovered—even with the simultaneous drought—but many did not, and I lost several mature hardwoods and ornamental trees around the farm, and nothing in the orchard has edible fruit on it this year. The new young blueberry bushes I planted last year barely survived and had so little fruit I basically snacked on it as I picked it. There will be nothing to harvest this year.
The moths are an invasive species. These outbreaks can lead to an increased risk of forest fires and threaten already vulnerable butterfly populations. So, as the cold weather arrives, I say good riddance to all the nasty bugs!
However, there is one bug I will kind of miss: the cicada. Last year, nightly news reports and websites were eager to announce the 2021 return of this mysterious little critter which hides beneath the earth and reemerges every 17 years, like clockwork, to feed, mate, and reproduce. This news baffled me because it seemed too soon for them to reappear. I’ve lived here just 15 years, and I definitely remember hearing them after I’d moved to the area. Unique conditions in the Hudson Valley apparently make for excellent cicada habitat, and it wasn't until I moved here and spent a lot of time hiking and canoeing in the undeveloped parts of the valley that I received the complete cicada experience for the first time, something I don’t remember ever hearing anywhere else I’ve ever lived. If you’ve never listened to a full chorus of cicadas like these, it’s a sound one doesn’t soon forget. If you can imagine standing in the center of a football stadium while everyone in the stands rattles a tambourine, that comes close….
When they’re out in full force—here, that means 1 million per 2.5 acres—they’re loud enough to cause hearing damage. The males “sing” stridently until they attract a mate, and the females lay their eggs on tree branches, which eventually hatch and fall to the ground, burrowing into the earth where they will drink the sap of tree roots, like the mythical dragon Níðhöggr, gnawing at the roots of Yggdrasil, for 17 years until some mysterious process signals it is time for them to emerge and begin their own brief but deafening courtship. They are relatively harmless to humans, animals, and crops and become food for other species.
I listened eagerly for them all last spring, but they never arrived. Then in the summer, I heard not the promised symphony of cicadas but a more intimate, subdued sounds of just a few quiet insects—a cicada quartet.
What was going on? Had the mass swarm been delayed? Had something gone wrong? Unlike this year’s heatwave and drought, we experienced heavy rains all through the summer last year. I remember this distinctly because I had just installed new raised garden beds and a sprinkler system that I never got to use. Also, the soil I bought for the beds had too high a clay content, and the beds, due to the heavy rains, held too much water all summer, and most of my vegetables failed to thrive (and Buckley, my resident deer and assistant gardener, finished off whatever did.) Accordingly, I had to amend the soil with lots of compost and do plenty of watering this year. There could not have been a greater contrast in weather from one year to the next.
I had worried all last summer about these missing cicadas. Were they delayed? Had the festival been canceled on account of the rain? Had they missed out on the most momentous event of their lives—a once every seventeen-year event? Thinking about it made me sad. I admit my total ignorance about the insect world and the lives of bugs. But I know something about what it’s like to be late for everything. I have a real problem with numbers generally and time specifically. Unless I make a deliberate effort to be early to something, I will arrive late. I’m not trying to make a statement or a power move or show disdain for the time of others. I have dyscalculia and can mess up numbers and time in innovative ways most people couldn’t even imagine. I was genuinely worried for these poor lost little bugs.
Then summer ended, and I didn’t think much more about it. Until this summer came, and I heard them again. Cicadas? Not a full chorus, but that little quartet, first singing in the morning, then in the evening, sometimes with a soloist or two in the afternoons. And that’s when it dawned on me that they weren’t lost. I was the one who was, once again, late to the party.
The Greeks said that Tettix, the cicada, sang loudest at dawn because originally, the cicada was Tithonus, the mortal lover of Eos, goddess of the dawn. When he asked the gods for immortality, he forgot to also ask for eternal youth, and he gradually shriveled to a husk until only his voice remained. Eos turned her withered lover into a cicada and kept him with her in a basket. Some of the most picturesque and endearing myths worldwide are those made to explain how the bodies in the heavens, features in the landscape, or characteristics of animals came to be. This may be one such tale.
I won’t call them humble creatures because, despite their tiny size, cicadas can make quite a racket. But for something so small and seemingly insignificant to humans, they have made an impression, not just on our ears but deep in our psyches. We are endlessly captivated by things that can live dual lives—that can descend into darkness and reemerge into the light. And the cicada seems immortal, able to regenerate itself from the depths of the earth—from what we have always envisioned as the realm of death. Ancient people may have actually believed the cicada was immortal, and it came to symbolize everlasting life. This ability lent the creature a certain aura of mystery—and respect.
In Greek and Roman Necromancy, Daniel Ogden describes the cicada’s affinity with ancient Greek spiritualism and necromancy:
It sang as a prophet. Just like a ghost, it derived from the earth, it was ancient and bloodless, and it was wise. The Greeks paradoxically attributed the qualities of both blackness and pallor to cicadas, just as they did to ghosts.
To an ancient culture with a belief in a spiritual underworld where souls of the departed would spend eternity, the appearance of creatures who, like grain, bury themselves in the earth and reemerge to a new life would have been evocative of fertility and resurrection. Their mythological language is filled with imagery of such regeneration, from Persephone to Dionysus. The unpretentious cicada is a bit of a surprise contender for reverence; however, before Solon, Athenians wore a golden cicada symbolizing their supposedly autochthonal origins, like the insect’s.
I’m not an entomologist by any stretch, and besides beekeeping, I know almost nothing about bugs except when I need to repel or kill the nuisance ones. Mostly, I ignore buzzing and crawling things unless they’re causing me or my animals and plants grief. But they are fascinating and often beautiful in their own sometimes creepy ways. And, while the vast majority of insects measure their lifespans in hours, days, or perhaps a year, the cicada’s 17 years is rare. Yet they spend nearly all of it in total obscurity and darkness, but for a brief final season in the sun. A remarkable life for a bug, or any creature, for that matter.
Curious about what might have happened to the 2021 cicadas, I did a little digging. As it turns out, the summer cicadas—the quartet—were not late or lost at all. Our area had received the wrong broadcast. The Hudson Valley (shown in red on the map below) was not due for an emergence of cicadas in 2021 after all. Different regional “broods” of cicada are all attuned to different rhythms, and the one that haunts my region, Brood II, had last emerged in 2013, when I recalled, and is not due to reappear until 2030. The news reports I was hearing and reading were predicting the emergence of a different population of cicadas, Brood X, (shown in yellow on the map below) which is endemic in parts of Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Without fact-checking, someone must have picked up the news from the neighboring state and reported it as local news, even though it didn't apply to our region, and the mistake continued to spread.
It just goes to show how unreliable even the simplest news story can be and how a little extra verification goes a long way to preserving one’s sanity.
I initially found the report odd, but unworthy of further research, so I just let it go, until it festered. All my speculation and wondering were in vain because it turns out that there are, in fact, two types of cicadas in the area where I live: periodical and annual. Maybe this is common knowledge, but unless bugs could do me or my animals and property harm—bite, sting, infect, infest, damage, etc. I never paid them any mind.
The periodical cicada that emerges in spring after long, fixed periods underground—usually 13 or 17 years—is very different from those that appear yearly after developing just a year or two below ground and becoming active at the end of summer. Where cicadas exist in the rest of the world, they are generally more like the annual type. The “brood” variety is pretty unique to North America, and their long tenure underground appears to be a strategy for evading predators by remaining out of synch with their lifecycles. So, I was hearing cicadas, just not those from the still subterranean Brood II species, waiting to emerge in 2030.
What’s more, they were always there. Each summer for fifteen years, that sound has surrounded me—and I never tuned myself to it. Like faint tinnitus, soft radio static, or a white noise machine used to muffle the world’s intrusions, blunt the silence of nighttime, and usher in sleep, I tuned it out. It was just the unexamined background noise of the countryside I’d always known. But the shoddy news report, though mistaken, had made me listen for them. Had made me aware of their absence. And I missed them when I thought they’d not come. Then I welcomed the latecomers I thought had finally arrived. For nearly fifteen years, somehow, I failed to recognize their voices in the landscape all around me. I know I heard them, but I never stopped to differentiate them from the background noise. To listen. Now I can’t stop hearing them.
At dawn, I think of Tithonus, reduced before his beloved Eos to little more than an immortal voice. Aesop said that the Muses created cicadas out of pity for poets who likewise withered away in their dedication to song. I like to imagine all of the nameless, forgotten bards whose poems have never been recited, songs never sung, stories never told, plays never performed, manuscripts never read—all resurrected as cicadas, greeting the sunrise, chirping forlornly into the night. Intellectually I know it isn’t true, but it gives them all substantiality—grants the voiceless a voice. It brings me into some phantom affinity with them—forcing me to stop and listen. We owe each other that much, at least. For all who faded away, unheard, but who kept singing: I’m listening.
Greek and Roman Necromancy. Ogden, Daniel. Princeton University Press, 2004.
Lovely reflection. Thank you. Is there a Cicada Resurrection Symphony? There should be.
I spent a summer in Columbia, Maryland, during the cicada outbreak of 2021 that you mentioned. I come from Indiana and love the sound of the “katydids” at night, but that infestation was beyond belief. I would routinely get into my car and have two of them clinging to my shirt.