Cicadas

[Duffield, SASS #23454]

This year is the year that cicadas replace Killer Hornets.

Does anyone have any good cicada stories?

 

Duffield

[Alpo]

I remember one of my kids asking me what that noise was, and I did not know what she was talking about, because while I heard it, I thought it was tinnitus and I hear it all the time anyway.

[Smuteye John SASS#24774]

You mean like a woman calling the sheriff about all of the noise (made by the cicadias) in the creek bottom behind her house?

[Dustin Checotah]

Haven't heard them since I left Kentucky in 72.

 

[Hardpan Curmudgeon SASS #8967]

I haven't encountered cicadas since I left West Texas in '65.  Folks there called 'em "Locusts."  Evidently that's an acceptable name in some regions, but it was kinda confusing. 

 

They were noisy boogers!  Zillions of 'em, it seemed.  Liked to hang out on tree branches, usually high enough to be safe from kids and other predators - although some of the older kids would try to shoot 'em outta the trees with BB guns.

 

They were rugged, too, as I recall.  Whenever some kids might capture an odd, wayward bug who might've fallen out of a tree or hadn't made it up to one yet, they'd tie a string to the li'l critter so it would fly around on a "leash," or swing 'em around their head to make 'em sing.  Some swore it worked, but ya coulda fooled me - I never saw it successfully done.  

 

When one gets used to the racket, they can be amusing li'l fellas.  

 

 

                                    

                                   

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

When my beautiful bride and I moved to the Yankee North, we camped out with fellow re-enactors at the Ukranian Camp not far from here.
Our round, pop up tent was set up in the middle of a woodlot.

That night the cicadas climbed the slopes of Mount Nylon and waited for daylight.
When we woke, my wife saw the silhouettes of many moving critters on the outside of the nylon.

Every B-grade, fear-driven horror flick that ever terrified her as a child detonated in her fertile mind, right behind her phobia of things that go buzz (a yellowjacket tangled in her hair when she was a Brownie Scout and played Singer Sewing Machine along the curve of her right ear, she said it sounded like a B17 on heavy takeoff) ... which of course inspired her to flee the proximity of these cannibalistic creatures from the Silver Screen!
She dove out the zippered door at the top of her lungs and made fifty yards before she realized her state of undress.
I am surprised she didn't make a back door because she re-entered our little enclosure at the same velocity she departed, and had she not collided with her still drowsy husband (which apparently absorbed enough momentum to keep her from penetrating the rear wall) ... well, I am told it was somewhat entertaining to see a pop up tent turn turtle ...