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After the previous car finally had all their questions answered, we pulled up to the State park entry station. We had driven two and a half hours from West Michigan to North-East Indiana to see the Brood X cicadas. On Google earlier in the week, I had seen a news story that cicadas had just emerged at Camp Sack-In. Because the camp was private, I figured that one of the nearby State Parks was our best chance to see some.
“Have any cicadas been seen in the park,” I asked the woman in the booth.
“No,” she replied.
What?!?
“In fact I’ve seen only three,” she added.
We were so disappointed! On top of that, the only suggestion she had was go farther south. Farther than we planned to travel.
What to do? As we drove back out toward the freeway, my wife suggested I call the other parks and ask if they had cicadas. While I looked up the phone number to the next park, I pointed out a garage sale sign – I love ‘finds’ in nature, while my wife loves ‘finds’ in other peoples’ garages. I called the next park; they also reported ‘no cicadas seen’. As we pulled up to the garage sale, I was turning over in my mind how much farther we were willing to drive.
My wife found an old metal gas can at the sale. She was elated. She plans to have her brother laser cut faces on it and others, and make them into Halloween decorations, an idea she saw on Pinterest or Instagram or one of those DIY Internet places. When we had pulled in, the owner was winding down his sale. He had sold off most of the tools he had for his two businesses, the first a handyman service and the second painting. He seemed like an interesting person so my wife asked him if he had seen any cicadas in the area?
She is definitely the smarter half in our partnership.
‘Oh yeah,” he told us. “Go to the Clear Lake Pub and they’re in the woods by there. They are so loud you have to shout to talk to someone.”
While he spent a couple minutes giving us directions, I was already typing “Clear Lake Pub” into Google maps in my mind; and then imaging a good, cold draft at the bar. One of his buddies drove up during this exposition and chimed in that he had finally heard the cicadas in the woods by C & K Greenhouses. Now we had two positive locations to achieve our goal!
We followed Google Maps and found the Pub. As we got out of our van, cicadas were flying singly back and forth, and we could easily hear an eerie drone from the woods behind the cottages on the other side of the street. We did sit at bar for 15 minutes and had a beer and water each to hydrate. Then we drove back a quarter mile and parked at the Clear Lake Lutheran Church and see what we could find.
This proved to be my ‘find’. The church had put a wood-chip path through the woods across the street, so we could easily walk in amongst the trees and see cicadas in this last stage of their life. To recap the Brood X end game: these cicadas spend 17 years growing underground in their nymph form. They feed on tree roots; thus they can survive only in mature, undisturbed woods. After 17 years, they emerge all at the same time. They climb a few feet up a tree where the nymph splits its exoskeleton, and then an adult climbs out and rests while its last exterior hardens and the only pair of wings in its life inflate. Finally, after 17 years living like dwarves, they are ready to party!
Now the adults fly to the upper reaches of the trees. The males buzz to court females and, when thousands sing at the same time, fill the forest with an eerie droning. Once they mate, the females scratch grooves in small branch and lay eggs in the grooves. Within a few weeks the adults die. Meanwhile, the eggs hatch into nymphs no bigger than a small grain of rice. These nymphs feed on sap in the branch groove until they are ready, then fall to the ground where they burrow and begin anew the 17 year cycle of feeding on roots.
We visited too late to see nymphs emerging from the ground. The locals told us that occurred two – three weeks prior. We did see the holes they had left behind when they emerged, plenty of empty exoskeletons still hanging on twigs and leaves, winged cicadas clinging unmoving to branches, and frequent flybys of individual adults. We went to a second location near Clear lake but there we could only observe from the woods from the side of the road. The Clear Lake Lutheran Church path was definitely a Find. It gave us an up close look at a unique occurrence in Nature – one that we might not have had were it not for a Garage Sale.
