Cicadas and Safe Places

According to a Michigan State University entymologist, Washtenaw County is the favored Michigan location for Brood X seventeen-year cicadas.  Throughout our neighborhood, we have cicada emergence holes, exoskeletons, and cacophonous jubilation.  People have mixed feelings about all this.  

     One neighbor in particular is less than thrilled.  Her yard is like other yards.  In other yards, cicadas have molted mostly one by one.  At roughly this woman’s lot line, that changes.  Her yard is full of exoskeletons, as are her sidewalk and driveway.  She’s had to sweep the husks away.  She has no idea what about her portion of Washtenaw County is so attractive to molting cicadas, but attractive it is.

     Other folks are disappointed and nigh unto cranky at not finding signs of the vaunted Brood X.  A man and woman were grumbling about this as the dog and I neared them on Nixon.  We stepped off the sidewalk to let them pass, and I glanced down to see rather a lot of the holes through which cicadas had made their way to the surface after seventeen years underground.  “Have you seen cicada holes?” I asked them.  “No,” they answered, rather shortly.  “There are some right here,” I said, pointing down.  “Where?” they asked, moving toward us.  I started pointing very specifically, and all at once the couple saw what they were searching for.  “There’s a ton of them!” he said.  “There are more over here!” she said.  They were so enthralled that they didn’t notice when the dog and I walked on.

     My husband made a similar introduction to Brood X for a neighbor, as we sat out back on the deck.  The neighbor said he hadn’t even heard the cicadas, which were loud even as he spoke.  My husband said, “They’re high pitched, and they start and stop.”  He matched the cicadas’ pitch and started and stopped with them through a few cycles, until our friend isolated the sound.  “Oh, yeah,” said our neighbor.  “They’re loud!”

     The volume of cicada song has become a beacon to our parks, Brood X’s party central.  And as you near a park, the increase in decibel level seems not so much a smooth slope as an exponential curve, like you’re walking into a ringing bell.  It’s a rock concert of cicadas. 

     At the other end of the serene-location spectrum is a water retention pond in a condominium development near us.  The site is sheltered—fenced and almost entirely surrounded by woods.  An aerator fountain shoots a spray of water up into the air and makes a lovely sound.  There’s a shaded bench for relief from the sun and heat.

     Yesterday, as the dog and I were walking home past that pond, we saw tiny new ducklings there, eleven of them.  They were not much more than the size of cotton balls.  We stopped to watch them skitter into and across the water from a wooded edge of the pond.  Soon they formed up, not into the usual line behind a parent but into more of a flotilla arrangement.  Mama and Papa Mallard were strikingly absent.

     Ducks are such protective parents.  What was up with unattended hatchlings?  Then I realized:  this was the perfect place for ducklings.  No snapping turtles to pull them under and gobble them up.  No people or dogs to come too close.  Good cover from above.  We watched a while longer, and Mama came flying in.  All was well in the mallard world.

     The duck family vignette reminded me of other happily situated ducks I have seen.  A mallard family used to nest in an enclosed inner courtyard of the local middle school.  You could see them through the glass, going about their ducky lives.  Then the ducklings would hatch, and the time would come for Mama to lead her flightless babies to water.  The staff would watch for signs that the time had arrived.  Then at lunchtime, they would have student volunteers line up shoulder to shoulder on either side of the courtyard door, forming a human alley down which the mallard family would process to the open outer door of the school, as more students watched from the balcony above.  Once outside, the ducks would keep going, across the street to the nature center and Thurston Pond.

     Marilyn and I saw even more pampered ducks at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee.  At the Peabody, for three-month stretches, five ducks at a time live in a duck palace on the hotel roof and travel each day via elevator and red carpet, to the strains of Sousa, to and from the large fountain in the hotel lobby.  Once their term of duty is up, the mallards return to normal ducky life.  The Peabody does not, under any circumstances, serve duck.

Critters’ lives and life cycles are going on all around us, sometimes raucously, sometimes in silence, and sometimes with pomp and circumstance.  What a pleasure they are to observe.  They enrich our lives on this planet.   

11 June 2021

1 comment

  1. Love this story and your descriptions are so visual that I feel that I am right there with you!

Comments are closed.