cicada-pocalypse

The sound is simply unbelievable - complete background ambient high-midrange that lasts all day. If you have ringing in your ears -- it's kinda ike that.

Not so much a chirp, as there are millions of little chirps going at once, creating an auditory "wash." A pretty loud white noise.

Sorta like if you ever lived near a busy subway and got used to the constant whoosh and squeal of the railcars.

Or one of those string toys that you could spin around and make whistle. If there were hundreds of them spinning around.

< Where are the pictures from?>

Maryland. My front yard.

We hung some netting in the carport so my wife wouldn't have to step on them to get to her car. I just spent 10 minutes batting hundreds off the net with a broom. It looks like a horror movie. Somehow they still get in.

There are thousands more on the driveway. So many in the tree, they just plop out of the sky. They don't really fly much. Just crawl up anything vertical.

A million and a half per acre, so they say.

just some average plants in the yard:

Some places have none. We are theorizing that's where people have been spraying lawn care products and RoundUp for the past 17 years. Probably seeps into the ground. Just a guess.

By the way, each bug in the pictures are about the size of your pinky finger. Bigger than a typical cricket. Like a fat grasshopper.

Jaz - not yet. We've had thunderstorms each night, so that may be helping.

This is a pic of a "bigger one" I found online, but they are mostly all the same size -- i.e., they don't grow once they emerge from the shell.

<hope they at least sing a rare and different tune.>

a combination of Mickey's crickets and Weir's "thick air." Right now I am in the basement and can hear them in the background through the closed sliding patio glass doors with no problem.

< through the summer? >

Supposedly by July they will be dead and gone -- back to the soil from whence they came, so to speak. The "babies" fall out of trees, burrow down, suck on tree roots and wait 17 years to surface, then climb trees, squawk and maybe mate. A surface lifespan measured in weeks.

<no gardening in Maryland this year?>

Dave, surprisingly they don't mess with any of the garden plants. I think because they are too short and gardens don't usually have trees in them. These bugs are all about partying in trees since they have been underground so long. They need to climb. That's all they seem to do.

We did have to wrap some of the smaller younger trees in protective netting as cicada moms slice the branch stems to lay their eggs. The mature trees aren't bothered. But the cicadas make so many tunnels around/under the trees, the soil gets real dry and the trees can wither in the heat unless it rains.

(I'm just learning all this stuff as I wasn't around the last two hatches.)

Mowing the lawn should prove interesting.

maybe not: 

"...that cicadas are attracted to lawn mowers, weed whackers and similar machinery because of the sound they make. Essentially, the machines sound like a chorus of cicadas ready to mate. He forwarded a message from a man in Tennessee who had 50 to 60 cicadas land on him while he was mowing his grass. They swarmed around him and his mower for more than an hour, alighting on his arms, legs, chest, back, face, hands and mower. According to Dan, if you want to avoid cicadas landing on you while doing yardwork, plan to mow during the early morning or late afternoon, when cicadas are less active."