The story sounds ridiculous, but it’s true: A man in Ohio recently drove his car into a utility pole after a cicada flew through his open window and smacked into his face. He was fine! The car, not so much.
The Brood X cicadas have certainly made their presence known over the past several weeks: their ceaseless screeching from the treetops, their slow, meandering manner of flying around, sometimes right into us. Last week, a plane carrying journalists who were accompanying President Joe Biden on his trip to Europe was delayed for more than five hours at a Virginia airport because of “mechanical problems caused by the cicadas.” Biden himself was not spared; standing on the tarmac before boarding his own plane, the president discovered a cicada crawling on his neck and swatted it away.
Strange cicada-related encounters seem to occur with every 17-year emergence of Brood X, as clockwork as the invasion itself, according to Gaye Williams, an entomologist at the Maryland Department of Agriculture. Williams keeps a file drawer full of quirky cicada tales going back to 1987. She has spent the past several weeks getting to know the cicadas in her backyard, taking decibel readings of their constant buzzing, and trying to stop her dog, Penelope, from gorging on the bugs. “All these animals want to do is what we want to do: They want to grow up, party, have kids,” Williams told me. I get it! But when they’re here, they’re everywhere. The sheer numbers are a great survival strategy for the species—with so many cicadas out all at once, predators can’t catch them all—but they’re also a ..
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