The "Next Coming" (Tulsa Chapter)

So I read my cousin Mandy's blog about the "Next Coming" of the cicadas when she posted it in the end of May of this year. (For those of you who haven't read it, read hers first as she is a much better writer than I: http://wheresmyrumball.blogspot.com/2007/05/accidental-entomologist.html)

Anyways, I laughed in the appropriate spots and was grossed out in the appropriate spots. I sort of sympathized in the way that people do when they hear about something happening but have never experienced it themselves. It was like reading a book and I thought "Oh poor Mandy" but it never really seemed real since it hadn't happened to me. Until last week.

Now I'll preface this by saying in no way is campus covered in cicada exoskeletons, nor is the sound unbearably loud. But we are apparently close enough to Chicago to experience the "coming" of the cicadas for ourselves.

I was walking across the street to another dorm the other day when I saw a few friends outside who had challenged each other to a tree-climbing contest. Needless to say they didn't get very far up the tree before they ran into the abandoned exoskeletons of the cicadas, still clinging to the bark! I still hadn't connected Mandy's story with the bug shells in "my own backyard" at this point, but I asked someone what was going on and they said "Look, cicadas!"

All of the sudden everything clicked. I looked at a few other trees nearby and saw the same shell carcasses sticking to the bark. And now I knew what those never ending buzzing/chirping sounds had been for the past few days! So of course I ran inside to get my camera and here is what I was able to capture...

The "next coming" of the cicadas (Tulsa chapter):

It is hard to tell the size of the bugs from the picture because there is nothing to reference it by. But when I picked up one of the shells it fit neatly into my cupped hand. It was about the size of a ping pong ball if all of the sudden the ping pong ball had become oblong and brown.