common_nature | Locust Shells (Reply)

Locust shells on my front yard maple tree, with yellow lichen. Some people insist on calling them "cicadas", but these are the same people who call buffalo "bison".

I grew up in southern Indiana, and from like 1970 through 1976 or so, we had a locust swarm every summer. After the first few years, they became just part of the background of summer, and nothing special. At the beginning, though, they were amazing! I remember driving out to the country with my aunt and uncle and mother and grandmother, and finding a tree just covered with them, and all the adults were talking about the last time this happened. Seeing them was like some strange link to a time before I was born.

If you live in a place that doesn't have them, or have never seen them, the noise they make is incedible! It's this loud, high-pitched, near-mechanical sound that just fills the world, rising and falling as these millions of little bugs all sing in chorus. In a swarm year, the trees are just covered with the empty shells. The bugs crawl up out of the ground (leaving hundreds of neat round holes), cling to the tree, and the winged adult hatches out of the case, leaving the husk behind. If you look closely, you can see that the shells still have the hollow cases for the sensory hairs attached.

One summer, for whatever reason, it became the thing to do to collect the empty shells, fill them with soap bubble solution, them smash them on your friends.

After '76, they tapered off the next summer, and then were gone. Summer afternoons seemed uncannily quiet.