A dispatch from the land of the cicadas

I just happen to be lucky enough to live where both broods of cicadas emerged, overlapping for the first time in 221 years.

I’m sharing with you something completely different from my usual topics today, and it’s about a very odd historic and scientific event I’m living through right now. It’s about the cicadas.

Have you heard about them? North America is the only part of the world that experiences periodical waves of cicadas, meaning large insects that show up after a certain number of years (the rest of the world does get cicadas annually but in much smaller numbers). The species of cicadas in the U.S. have either 13-year life cycles or 17-year cycles, meaning they emerge from the ground to cover everything in sight only once every 13 or 17 years.

The two different life cycles almost never occur at the same time … but they’re both here in 2024. By “here” I mean literally here, because per the New York Times, I just happen to be lucky enough to live in one of the “small patches of Illinois [where they are] likely to come out of the ground in the same place.” You can see a map of this once-in-a-lifetime event (I hope) here. Look for the small patch where Broods XIII and XIX intersect -- that's me!

I’m pretty sure that at least one million of the projected trillion cicadas are in my backyard.

Continued below.