Tag: Cicadas

They Call Him Flipper, Flipper . . .

It was a dark and stormy night.

The woodchuck sat back and contemplated her opening line. A classic thriller deserved a non-traditional, original approach, and she felt weather really set the scene.

She was not new to writing—she had already finished her life story and in her opinion, it was a best seller. Sort of like A Million Little Pieces, only with groundhogs and truth. But countless posts on agent Twitter warned her that a debut memoir was the hardest manuscript to sell; so she set aside the three volume, 400,000 word tome it had taken her three soul-sucking weeks to complete and concentrated instead on being the next Stephen King. How hard could it be to write something like Cujo? She knew a lot about angry animals, being one herself.

She wished it really were dark and stormy, because maybe that would shut up the damn cicadas. The woodchuck had nothing against the bugs; in fact, she was quite fond of them, especially if they were served with a nice red and some quality EVOO. She understood they were excited about coming above ground and having sex (easier than coming below ground, she chortled to herself) but honestly, did they have to constantly scream about it? There had been some gossip about a fungus that caused the cicada genitals to fall off and turn them into zombies, which sounded like a perfect plot for her horror story.

Her cousin Shirley had been flipping through the woodchuck’s memoir looking for references to herself, but now she said, “Why are you still writing about cicadas? Now that that the two broods are gone, no one cares.”

The woodchuck looked around her burrow where the floor was littered with cicada exoskeleton like so many peanut shells at a Ground Round. “I just had some for lunch!”

“Yes, but those are the regular ones that come at the end of summer. The zombies are gone—you’re behind the trend.”

The woodchuck sighed and deleted the first line. It was so hard to stay current; the news moved around as fast as an infected cicada whose junk had just fallen off.

“Why don’t you write about something important that affects us all?” Shirley nagged. “There is a huge election coming up in November. Haven’t you been watching the convention?”

“Is it time to go through that whole get out the vole thing again?” complained the woodchuck. “Didn’t we already do that?” The woodchuck was known for being blind not because she couldn’t see, but because she tended to focus only on things that interested her, such as writing a best seller or the new season of Love is Blind UK (thank god for closed captioning because she couldn’t understand a word they were saying).

“It’s Get Out the VOTE, you idiot; the voles have nothing to do with it. Although I heard they might be switching to Harris now that RFK, Jr. has dropped out. They loved the whole brain worm thing until they realized he wasn’t giving them away.”

“Is he the one who was into dolphin porn?” The woodchuck wasn’t completely out of touch; she had spent hours researching that topic when it first started trending. She made a mental note to delete her search history in case Shirley borrowed her computer.

“No, that guy is running for VP with the weasel who has the fox tail stapled to his head.”

“Wait, is he the one they call a heterosectional because he likes to . . .” 

“I knew you were paying attention!” interrupted Shirley. “Why do you pretend this isn’t important? You always make jokes!” 

Shirley finally left, nagging about the responsibility of voting and patriotism and how much she hated bald eagles. Finally alone, the woodchuck pulled out a shirt she had owned for years, the one with the slogan on it that was close to her heart. The knot of tension she had been carrying around in her stomach for weeks had finally lessened, but she couldn’t admit that to Shirley. The fear of the weasel had been waking her up in the middle of the night for months now, and it was easier to focus on jokes than admit how scary the whole situation was. Soon it would be time to hibernate, and she had hoped to sleep through the election.

Except maybe not? If she could stay awake for the next 72 days, perhaps she could help.

She could give the public what they needed to be inspired the way she had been by all those balloons. She would write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told—a political thriller involving weasels who turn into zombies, with lots and lots of dolphin sex. In between the fish porn and the brain worm mystery would be a well-thought out list of a couple thousand reasons why electing these animals was a bad idea. She was thinking of calling it Project 2025.

She pulled the shirt over her head and the slogan Mind Your Own Damn Business stretched across her belly. Words to live by, indeed. A cicada fell out of the fold of her neck, and she popped it into her mouth. She wondered if they had caffeine in them. She was going to need it.

Shirley says: “Be sure to check your registration to make sure no one has purged you from the voting rolls!” And get out the vole!

The Cicada Parade-A!

(Still not the woodchuck, although she enjoys them as a snack)

I am a proud participant in the Cicada Parade-A, a public art project happening around the city of Chicago and neighborhoods. As the real heroes emerge from the warming soil, so will these 18 inch plaster casts painted by anyone who is as fascinated by the bugs as I am.

My cicada is called “Monument with Flying Beast”; it is a tribute to the piece of public art by Jean Debuffet that stood in front of the State of Illinois building downtown for forty years. Now that Google has bought the building, the sculpture will be moved to the Art Institute. The original piece was called “Monument with Standing Beast” and the abstract work represented an animal, tree, portal and architectural form, which also kind of applies to a cicada, amiright?

Public art endures as long as humans create! #cicadaparada

The Wings Beneath Her Wind

The meeting room I sat in had one wall that was all glass, which would have been a lovely diversion if it hadn’t looked out onto a parking lot. Sealed in like vacuum-packed salmon, I couldn’t even hear the drone of cicadas, which had been loud and constant that summer. Bored by the droning inside, a flash of white caught my eye outside. Abandoning any pretense that I was paying attention, I moved my chair closer to the window and was suddenly nose to nose with a tiny white creature. Its mouth was opening and closing silently, but it was clear the sound coming out was a pitiful meow. 

“Look, it’s a kitten!” I shouted, completely disrupting the meeting. I grabbed a cardboard box and immediately ran outside. People at the window were pointing and shouting directions as I crawled under the bushes trying to find the cat. Their mouths opened and closed silently, and I realized this was the view the kitten must have had of us. Finally spotting it, I gently lifted it into the box. A silent cheer went up inside the room.

I took the tiny beast to my vet to get her checked out; he reported she was about six weeks old, skinny but in good health, probably abandoned by her mother. Amused, he said the fact that she survived on her own was amazing, but the truly astonishing thing was that her food source was cicadas. The proof was in the poop, which was full of insect exoskeleton. Eww. Trust me, you don’t want to be downwind of a cat who has been subsisting on these bugs. 

That was 2007. How could I not keep a kitty with an origin story like that? My fascination with cicadas began when I learned that the kitten had been smart enough to hunt them as dinner. I use the term “hunt” loosely, as this was the last time the Brood XIII bugs emerged and there were so many of them scattered about the forest floor that it must have made a crunchy noise when she walked. Entomologists say that even the hungriest predators eventually get sick of eating cicadas, because the sheer number of them is mind-boggling and animals get tired of gorging on them. I’ve been told that works for pizza, too, although I have not found it to be true. 

Seventeen years later, here they come again, and this time they are bringing friends. They are meeting up with the younger thirteen-year-old BroodXIX for the first time in one hundred years, and who knows what kind of party these guys are planning. The giant bugs are a bit creepy when you consider they will number in the billions, but aside from the ick factor, they are mostly just really loud. I am always stunned by the amount of exoskeleton left behind as they crawl out to mate for a swinging couple of days. At the last cicadapalooza, I collected cannisters full of their discarded shells, unsure why I wanted them but certain in the knowledge that I could do some kind of craft project. They are quite delicate, but with patience and a little shellac, I discovered that I could make fanciful earrings and necklaces out of them. I know what everyone is getting for Christmas this year!

The return of the seventeen-year Brood XIII cicadas is how I measure my cat’s time with me, like an oversexed bug growth chart with glowing orange eyes. That kitten is now old and fat and has outlived all the other pets in the house. She prefers her meals served from a can now, but we both look forward to the return of her former food source.

I may bring some live cicadas into the house just to see how she will react. Purina has a complicated formula that suggests she is the equivalent of eighty-four human years old. Some fresh, crunchy snacks might be just the nostalgic trip through her kittenhood that will make her forget how much her knees hurt when she still jumps up on the counter.

(The woodchuck is relaxing after her stressful eclipse experience, and will return later with her new art project, an installation that pays homage to Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party; only instead of vaginas, it will feature cicadas.
This essay is part of The Rude Brood, which is a subset of The Ripple Effect, which for some reason is occasionally part of the Blind Woodchuck. Don’t try to figure that out—at least it’s free!)
Cat Eating Cicadas illustration by Cheryl Welch

Part Three: Every Now and Then I Fall Apart (alternate title: Eat, Prey. Love)

Panic had broken out around her. All the forest animals were aware of the near miss the woodchuck had during the last eclipse and were terrified of not being able to watch for predators. Most had never even realized there were things happening in the skies above them—the only time they looked up was for hawks. Now everyone was suddenly Chicken Little when it came to the sky.

“The birds knew and they didn’t warn us!” screamed the field mice. “It’s a conspiracy!”

“The crickets are in on it, too!” wailed a hedgehog. “How did they know to start chirping? Did they have access to an app that’s only on Android?”

A groundhog, manically running in a circle with his eyes closed, tripped over a root and tore his ACL. He lay on the ground moaning, clutching his wounded limb and making such a racket that it caught the attention of a turkey vulture flying by. This was exactly the kind of eclipse content the bird was hoping for.

The woodchuck was stunned to see the entire meadow and forest had erupted into chaos. Scientists had predicted some animal behaviors might be odd during the eclipse, but not this level of weird. She was horrified to see one of her cousins lying prostrate on the grass, his naked belly exposed to the sky as he screamed incoherently about the end being near. The buzzard certainly seemed to agree with him.

It occurred to the woodchuck that some of the animals might be blaming her for this, which was, of course, ridiculous. All she had done was pretend to be blind for several years to get people to pamper her and bring treats; she never said anything about writhing around on the ground in plain sight of a very large bird with talons and a beak.

Oh. Well, perhaps they had a point.

The woodchuck ducked back into her burrow, uncertain of what to do about the carnage that was about to erupt. Shirley was fully awake now and could hear the screaming above ground. “Do something!” she shouted. “You’re the only one they will listen to!”

The woodchuck did not believe this was necessarily true, but her only other option was going deeper into the burrow and hiding in a tunnel. She glanced wildly around the cozy dark room, trying to think of what to do, when her eyes fell upon a metallic cold food shopping bag she had saved from her last trip to Costco. 

“Shirley!” she screamed. “Help me tear this into strips!” The two woodchucks ripped the silver fabric into long pieces as fast as possible, and she scrambled up the tunnel gripping as many as her tiny arms could hold. 

She paused at top of the hole. Outside there was terror and screaming and possible disembowelment; fellow groundhogs who hated her and felt she was responsible for the carnage that was about to happen. It would be so much easier to duck back inside and hide.

She flashed back on the last eclipse and the power she had felt course through her body just before her retinas started smoking. Maybe there was just a little bit of Captain Marvel still in her.

She dashed out of the hole and threw herself on top of her writhing cousin, flipping him several times until he fell into a nearby burrow. The turkey vulture was in a dive straight for the entrails but had to pull up before it hit the ground, zooming back into the air before readying another approach. This time it was going for her.

“Tie these around your eyes!” she screamed at the other animals, tossing the foil strips in the air. “You won’t go blind!” She threw the last ones at the other woodchucks just as the vulture snatched her by the nape of her neck and lifted her in the air. Shirley seized her foot and went airborne herself. One by one, all the now blindfolded rodents grabbed onto to each other and formed a furry chain that tethered them to ground; it stretched into the sky at least fifteen woodchucks high. 

The turkey vulture gave up, as the groundhogs were all pretty chunky and probably kind of grisly. The chain plummeted to the ground, with the woodchuck hitting last with a wince-inducing smash.

She awoke to a cold compress of soothing leaves on her forehead and a crowd of doting animals trying to anticipate her every need, bringing her insects and delicious berries. It was just like the last eclipse, only this time she could see their grateful faces beaming at her. She was their hero, but now she deserved it. She would be as humble as long she possibly could, or at least until they stopped waiting on her.

She picked up a fresh cicada someone offered her and bit into it, the crunchy filling delighting her senses. There were two or three on the bark platter, and she popped them into her mouth as well. Were they early this year? It seemed too soon for cicadas.

The woodchuck sighed and relaxed. Spring was here, and it was calm, and quiet. She hoped there wouldn’t be any more extraordinary natural phenomena to worry about this year.