bugs

Early yesterday I was looking out the front window and noticed cicada shells on our tree. There were many shells, and I went out to get a closer look. On the trunk, and on some other plants nearby, and on the front of our house, were perhaps a hundred shells. I found some cicadas, too, looking a little bewildered.

Erin and Jill looked at them with me, and we caught some and held them. Erin held one, and threw it up to help it fly (such actions do seem to help, as cicadas' capacity for graceful flight is about on level with their capacity to win a bathing suit competition). Even Jill, normally a bit bug-shy, tried to hold one, but it kept jumping from her hand.

Last night, around midnight, I went out to see if there were more coming out. There were! Here's a little fella crawling up the tree, looking for a place to stop and shed his skin:

And another one nearby, getting all David Banner on his pants:


They slowly slip out of their juvenile exoskeletons like pale ghosts rising from shriveled corpses, except they sort of tend to hang upside-down. You know, I try, but it's not so easy to wax poetic about fat red-eyed bugs shedding their skins on tree trunks at midnight:
A side view:

Dinner last night was at Pat and Laura's. Lots of fun seeing everyone, and lots of great food. Pat and Laura boiled shrimp with sausage and potatoes. The shrimp were tasty. I kept wondering how many people love shrimp but would recoil at the thought of eating cicadas. Those who are disgusted by either idea are missing tasty food (and I refer to shrimp, as I have yet to try the cicadas), but I certainly understand their revulsion. Those who think shrimp is a great food but cicadas are disgusting buggy non-food are deluding themselves. If it has more legs than a cow, it's a bug.

I don't know what kind of cicadas these are. I suspect they might be the same sort of 17-year cicadas that came out en masselocally four years ago, just on a different schedule. But I guess they could be, what, 13-year? And I think there are 7-year? I'll have to look it up sometime.