I Know Why The Cicadas Scream

It begins with a few lazy tones, like a middle school orchestra tuning up after lunch.

More notes rise, becoming a hyperactive chorus as neighbors and friends heed the ancestral signal.   

Then comes the deafening masterpiece: A cacophony of millions of horny insects, shrieking their virility in a dissonant opera that heralds the onset of another sticky Southern summer. 

Though I’ve yet to hear the siren call of our cicada friends this season, we know they’re coming. Not just because they always set up their shrill sideshow around this time every year, but because it seems like literally everyone is talking about them: Even TikTok has a whole algorithm page dedicated to these red-eyed, lace-winged buzzers.

For weeks our feeds have been swarmed with stories about the coming “cicadapocalypse,” featuring the convergence of two types of periodical cicadas, which burrow underground and hatch every 13 or 17 years, respectively. 

Not to be confused with our usual annual arthropods, Brood XIX (the Great Southern Brood) and Brood XIII (the Northern Illinois Brood) have synched their cycles for an incredibly rare event not seen (or heard!) since 1803, the same year Ludwig Van Beethoven debuted his Symphony No. 2 in D Major. American cicadas *probably* didn’t influence the famously hard-of-hearing Viennese composer’s fourth movement’s odd opening motif, but you never know; they’re THAT loud.

Early May’s great double brood hatching didn’t make its way this far South — unlike last week’s wildly weird aurora borealis event, which gave many folks their first glimpse of the Northern lights, if only through their phone cameras. (Lotta super-natural phenomena happening lately; what’s next, frog rainstorms and the discovery of a second moon? Apparently, yes.)

The cicada stories keep coming. Obviously, it’s notable that an extra several trillion juicy bugs provide the birds and snakes with a wanton feast equivalent to a cruise ship happy hour buffet. But it turns out these bountiful buggers have their own special predator: The Eastern Cicada Killer.

Unlike their carnivorous cousins the murder hornets, these hideous two-inch long wasps aren’t poisonous to humans. But to their prey, they’re a horror show straight from the movies: Female cicada killers dig burrows and lurk about until they spot a cicada buzzing about like an overstuffed jellybean with wings. The savage huntress catches her target in mid-flight and stings it into a stupor before dragging it into her hole and eating half of it while it’s still alive, then lays eggs inside the partially consumed carcass. 

Seems like a pretty diabolical fate for the harmless cicadas, which don’t sting or bite or bother anybody, unless you’re trying to sleep or hold a conversation.  

“Nature is a brutal bitch,” shrugs artist and landscape architect, Lisa D. Watson, who encounters plenty of cicadas, their killers, and all manner of environmental realities in her tireless campaign to replace local backyards with native plants. “This is how the ecosystem replenishes itself.”

What a buzzkill. Around here we really like cicadas — in fact, someone in the family has a very large tattoo of one — and love to spend summer evenings listening to their discordant hosannas, until the gnats chase us back inside.

But it’s possible to be unreasonable about the cicadaphilia. I read about eleventeen articles this week that include recipes for just-molted specimens, from cicada tempura to cicada spring salad to a travesty known as cicada rhubarb pie.

Yet how many of those media darling chefs have actually experienced the tactile satisfaction of pulling empty exoskeletons off the screen door or the spasmodic terror of a fat screaming green orb flying into one’s hair?

I don’t know if GenZ has been bingeing early seasons of Fear Factor or what, but scarfing down the songstresses of summer is just a pretentious gastronomic bridge too far. Cicadas have a simple, short destiny, and there’s just something undignified about displacing avocado toast and shishito peppers as the new hot hipster snack. 

Adorable but absolutely not a snack

I happened to be in the company of the highly gifted palates of Sixby on Saturday at a crazy fun Caribbean-themed Thomas Square neighborhood block party and put this out there: Would you eat cicadas, and if so, how would you prepare them?

These culinary wizards, all well-versed in regional delicacies, considered this as they cracked open juicy Tybee Oyster Company Salt Bombs, served on the half shell with a zesty banana vinegar mignonette. (Eating creatures with exoskeletons is fine if they come from the ocean, OK?)

All of them gave cicadas-as-food a unanimous thumbs-down. 

“It would have to be a total poverty situation,” said Steffan Rost, shaking his head, even though he is a member of the shoegaze musical outfit Bugmeat.

Matthew Palmerlee does not normally waste breath answering silly queries, but he deliberated attentively over his oyster knife before declaring “they’d definitely have to be fried.” 

My best homegirl and victual wunderkind Natasha Gaskill wrinkled her nose but is never one to shy away from a challenge, thus concluding that “they would have to be in a Chex Mix or something to mask the texture, with lots of spice.”

Honestly, I’d eat anything these chefs put in front of me, but thankfully there will be positively no bugs on the menu when Sixby opens at the end of the month in its idyllic new space under the oaks between Over Yonder and Lone Wolf Lounge. You can expect fresh-baked breads, sammiches and late-night falafel, the latter finally fulfilling midtown’s post-bar empty-tummy niche.

Maybe in the future cicada broods will help solve world hunger or become the next big fast food franchise (cicada kabobs, cicada fries, cicada soup, cicada a la king…) But how long before some foodie influencer from Brooklyn announces that cicadas are the new shrimp?)

For now let’s let them hatch, sing, mate and be swallowed by a bird or murdered by a wasp in peace.

Well, their peace, not ours. Enjoy summer’s beautiful noise!

Ain’t no bugs on me; can’t speak for anybody else ~ JLL