Science writer Carl Zimmer has a piece on the emergence of the 17-year cicadas in Tuesday’s Times
, with a great lead:
From North Carolina to Connecticut, billions of creatures with eyes the color of blood and bodies the color of coal are crawling out of the earth.
He’ll be adding an interactive map of their infestations (somehow a little more unsettling than the travels of the monarch butterflies, tracked in Learner.org’s Journey North).
I lived through a previous emergence of “Brood II” (1979 I think) in Salisbury, MD, and it was like something out of a Sci Fi film. Our tree-lined front sidewalk was coated with insects, and the night sounds were theirs entirely. Now I’m right next to Rock Creek Park, and haven’t caught site of one yet, but am expecting (and actually looking forward to) an evening symphony of their “dry and exalted” sounds, (as James Agee put it).
A Few Reasonable Words 