We got really lucky this year in that three different types of cicadae are all hatching at the same time. If you live in town, it isn’t so bad, but the further out in the country you are the more likely you are to lose your sanity having to listen to millions of these things serenading each other with their songs of courtship. (A local newspaper told us that we were to expect locusts, but these are obviously not locusts.)
We had a bumper crop of cicadae when Geordie was a puppy, and he loved crunching on the shells. Thankfully Toby doesn’t seem to be interested in them. I don’t think I could hold down my lunch if I had to listen to that again.
Other than sounding like Hollywood UFOs, these oversized insects are doing something terrible which is distracting the local birds away from a very important job…eating the ants that are taking over my garden! The robins are so fat and lazy after gorging on cicadae that they lie around on their backs with their wings on their stomachs whining for Tums.
By the time the cicadae are back underground, I think the ants will have taken over like one of those 1970’s TV disaster movies. (Starring Linda Day George, of course.)
What? You would rather I eat the cicadae?
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Come to a world with no ants and no cicadae! Join Bitey and Toby in Dream Our World as the visit the museum of their dreams.
Inside, the boys imagine themselves into the famous works of art – they have no interest in the lesser known ones – as they explore all that the museum has to offer.
(Honest. It’s really cute. I have found that everyone from little kids to great grandmas enjoy it.)
The Adventures of Bitey Dog 
Are they the annual visitor type or periodical cicada that only show up once a decade or so? Either way they can indeed drive a person crazy with that in incessant sound. The shells don’t look too tasty but doggo will eat anything.
One type is supposed to arrive every 17 years, and another every three years. I don’t remember what cycle the third kind is on. The swimming pools around here are pretty disgusting.
I actually enjoy that incessant noise from them. We must have the every three year kinds and also some other. It seems we have one kind of another every summer.
Normally they aren’t so loud, but now we have to shout to be heard over them. The eventual quiet is going to seem deafening.