For more than a week, I’ve been walking around my yard at night with a UV flashlight, looking for the white glow of cicada nymphs emerging from their exoskeletons. I walk around again in the morning looking for their spent shells clinging to a tree or a stalk of pokeweed. I look for the gentle creatures themselves, their new wings shining in the sunlight. And all the time I am thinking about the turning of the earth, the passing of the years. To think about periodic cicadas is necessarily to contemplate time.
These insects live underground as nymphs for 13 years — or 17, in some broods — sipping sap from the roots of the tree where they hatched. When the right amount of time has passed and the soil temperature eight inches down is just right, the nymphs rise to the surface and climb a tree or flower stem or a stalk of no-mow-May grass.
There they molt and emerge as new beings, creatures that occupy not the darkness but the treetops. Males vibrate a love song. Females quietly click a willingness to mate, later laying eggs on small twigs near the ends of branches. Then the parents die, the eggs hatch, the new nymphs fall to the ground and bury deep beneath the soil, and the whole magical process starts all over again. I cannot stop watching them climb out of the ground and out of their skins, entering a new shape with gorgeous glittering wings.
In 1998, I was hugely pregnant with my third child when Brood XIX cicadas, the group now emerging in Nashville, first began to erupt and fill our trees with music. We nicknamed our newborn Cicada Joe, the baby who emerged into a sunny new world just as millions of cicadas were also emerging into brightness. Our baby became a teenager during the last emergence. This time he is a man. As an ecosystem measures time — and also as a mother measures time — it all happened in a blink.
For the rest of my life, these cicadas will make me think of being so close to giving birth that my swollen feet could fit in no shoes. I was in love with the glorious bounty of these benign creatures climbing into the light. I, too, was bountiful. I, too, was living in a world filled with light and life and the urgency of the future. Our 6-year-old invited a cicada to ride around on his shoulder every time he walked outside. His younger brother’s eyes widened the first time I gently set a cicada on the back of his dimpled toddler hand.
We should all be filled with such wonder.
This year is the first time since 1803 that two different broods of periodic cicadas — up to a trillion of them — are emerging at the same time, though mostly not in the same place. The 13-year Brood XIX will emerge here in the South and the lower Midwest, and the 17-year Brood XIII will emerge in the upper Midwest. (The broods will overlap in only a few places in Illinois.)
Wonder is not always the response they engender. All over this year’s double-brood range, spring brides are trying not to come apart. School administrators are wondering if they should move their commencement ceremonies indoors. Nearly everyone else is needlessly worrying that so many bugs will harm their trees.
“Cicadas and trees evolved together,” Joanna Brichetto, a Nashville naturalist and author of the forthcoming book “This Is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature,” likes to point out. Any tree that was growing 13 years ago — or 17, in the case of Brood XIII — has already been peacefully coexisting with cicadas for many years. Unless the tree dies or someone cuts it down, tree and cicadas will continue to coexist peacefully. The link between them is so intimate that if the tree dies, the cicada nymphs attached to its roots will also die.
The music will be much softer this year because we have lost so many trees here in Music City during the last 13 years.
It’s true that large trees will lose small clusters of leaves at the joint where the female laid her eggs, but the tree itself will be fine. Don Sudbrink, an entomologist at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn., recommends covering very young trees and fruit trees with a fine mesh. But I am not a fruit farmer, and I don’t know what I’m doing with mesh, so I am taking my chances with the cicadas. In this yard, I’m more worried about unintended consequences to baby animals if I wrap my baby trees the wrong way or with the wrong kind of fabric.
I do understand why the spring brides are worried, but I hope they can come to embrace this beautiful and rare phenomenon. For the rest of their lives, they will have a story to tell. And every time the cicadas emerge again, the brides will remember the day they stood with their beloveds beneath the singing trees to celebrate their faith in each other, and in their shared future.
Cicadas neither bite nor sting. They have no way to protect themselves. The great gift of any cicada emergence is abundance, one that ensures the survival of many other creatures. Nearly any kind of wildlife you can think of — birds and squirrels and chipmunks and opossums and skunks and foxes and coyotes and garter snakes and skinks and box turtles and fish and toads and frogs and even the red wasps — will gorge themselves on cicadas.
Many millions of them will nevertheless survive to produce the next generation. The phenomenon is called “predator swamping,” according to Dr. Sudbrink: “The early ones are going to get picked off, but by the time it’s all over, they’ll get through to the next generation in massive amounts — as long as the trees are allowed to live,” he told me in a phone interview. “Keep the trees alive, and you’ll have cicadas again.”
In the fractured, misunderstood and too often persecuted world outside our windows, a cicada emergence is a reminder that we have not yet destroyed it all.