We have about 20 trees in our yard, all of them fairly old, so there were lots of places for female cicadas to lay their eggs 17 years ago, and now the next generation is crawling out of the ground everywhere. They will climb pretty much any vertical surface, hoping it's a tree.
In some cases -- when they ascend a telephone pole or a wooden fence post, for example -- their mistakes may be understandable. But they also climb brick walls, car tires, even the vacuum cleaner I use to dispose of them. They are remarkably reckless, even for sex-crazed 17-year-olds.
And these cicadas are helpless when they run into trouble. Unlike, say, grasshoppers, they don't have the sense or the agility to avoid an oncoming vacuum nozzle. If they happen to fall on their backs, they just lie there with six feet kicking in the air until they starve, a bird snaps them up, or someone steps on them.
The 17-year cicadas' only survival tactic is their vast numbers, the very thing that makes them so revolting. If you have a few cicadas in your yard, you've got wildlife; if you have hundreds of thousands, you've got a plague. This is just the sort of thing God used to punish the Egyptians, except their swarms didn't last as long.
But according to Jeffrey A. Lockwood, a professor of natural sciences and humanities at the University of Wyoming, the cicadas are a blessing, not a curse. "Their celebration of the flesh reminds us that underneath our tidy gardens and parks lurk vestiges of untamed nature," he writes in a New York Times op-ed piece. "They are not something to fear and loathe, but to embrace."
Don't embrace them too hard, though, unless you want insect insides all over your shirt as well as your sidewalk.