So those are cicadas!

I'm an idiot. I was driving to work today and I saw this little creature buzzing about and thought, "wow, that's a hummingbird... amazing!" I smiled to myself and felt a little bit of magic. About 20 minutes later I saw another one and thought... WOW. ANOTHER HUMMINGBIRD! Then promptly forgot about it for the rest of the day.

Until I was driving home on the Edens, and I noticed another little buzzing thing, the same as whatever I had seen that morning, then another. I started to get really curious and finally when I was stopped (not too hard to do in stop and go traffic), I saw one flying repeatedly (oddly) into the median and thought, "oh! oh! that's not a hummingbird, it must be a cicada!" I hadn't seen one yet despite constantly hearing about them in the Illinois media (for those of you who don't know, the 17-year cicadas have emerged from the ground this summer), so I was pretty excited. I'm not even into bugs and I was excited.

But it was so strange, on this stretch of the highway, I saw a new one flying around the cars and then toward the median every 30 seconds or so. Then I noticed something. I looked at the ground around the median (next time I stopped I looked more closely) and noticed that there were hundreds of dead cicadas along this stretch. (at this point I figured out they really must be cicadas b/c of their red legs that I could see from my car. Plus they are really big bugs!) The bugs flying into the median were also looking like they were about to drop any minute.

So, I thought about it.... after living underground for 17-years, hundreds or thousands of cicadas crawled out, flew across the expressway traffic, crashed into the median, and died. How odd and depressing is that? I'm not sure what it means for mankind, but it's gotta be a letdown for the poor cicadas.