The "Red-Eyed Periodical Cicada" Story

It was an ordinary day.  My local newspaper posted a story in my morning paper that was previously posted in Newberry, South Carolina that was titled "Police get noise complaints about cicadas."  The story read.... "Emerging cicadas are so loud in one South Carolina county that residents are calling the sheriff's office asking why they can hear sirens or a loud roar.  The Newberry County Sheriff's Office sent out a message on Facebook this past Tuesday letting people know that the whining sound is just the male cicadas singing to attract mates after more than a decade of being dormant."  Guess I'd do the same thing if I were in their situation.  "Some people have even flagged down deputies to ask what the noise is all about," Newberry County Sheriff Lee Foster said.  "The nosiest cicadas were moving around the county of about 38,000 people, about 40 miles northwest of Columbus, SC, prompting calls from different locations as Tuesday wore on," Foster said.  Trillions of red-eyed periodical cicadas are emerging from underground in the eastern U.S. this month.

The red-eyed Cicada

The broods emerging are on 13-year or 17-year cycles.  Their collective songs can be as loud as jet engines, and scientists who study them often wear earmuffs to protect their hearing.  After Tuesday, Foster understands why.  "Although to some, the noise is annoying, but they pose no danger to humans or pets," Foster wrote in his statement to county residents.  "Unfortunately, it is the sounds of nature."  In most cases the cicadas, which live about a month, will die not far from where they had emerged.  How would you like to have a lifetime expectancy of about a month?  Well, Cicadas will appear soon in the states of Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, southern Wisconsin and Iowa.  And...in no time they will be gone until 2038 or perhaps 2042.  Isn't life strange...at least for the red-eyed periodical cicadas.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.