Rising like zombies from beneath the trees, a 13-year swarm of cicadas has taken to the air in search of love.
The average summer night in Memphis is filled with the sounds of crickets, frogs and a small number of cicadas that visit annually. But every decade or so, out of the blue, there's a an obnoxiously loud noise that leads people to ask, "what's making all that racket?"
Some say it sounds like an alien space ship, a gas grill or some kind of whale-pitched sonar.
"The other day I thought my neighbor was using a weed eater," said Nicole Robbins, an audiologist. "An hour later, she was still using the weed eater."
Once people knew what it was, they wanted to know why.
"I googled it, that's how I realized they were the 13-year cicadas, just not the ordinary cicadas," Robbins said.
These cicadas crawl out of the ground like little zombies, the size of your pinky toe. Their one-month mission: fly, sing, mate, die.
The sound comes from the male cicada using his tymbal. It's the body part that makes the noise to woo a female. Cicadamania.com, a website for all things cicada, made a video showing that snapping one’s fingers can entice the male cicada to turn on its stomach buzzer. I wanted to try that out. Nicole and I plucked a cicada from a leaf.
After many snaps, he didn't make a peep. I'm better with dogs than I am most other species, including humans, so I tried a new strategy.
Speak. Shake. Sit-up. Beg.
Nope.
We tried appealing to his sense of masculinity, a lonely bachelor on his leaf.
Want a woman? You gotta make some noise man. You gotta do better than that...Hear all those girls? There waiting for you.
I wasn't sure how many weeks our cicadas would be around, so I drove to my aunt and uncle’s house out in Eads. I read that cicadas are drawn to the sounds of power tools and lawn equipment. I borrowed my uncle's leaf blower.
I turned it on, set it down and moved a safe distance away in case a swarm headed toward me like Tippi Hedren in “The Birds.”
After a few minutes of that racket, the only thing that got near me was a wasp. I grabbed the blower and left.
For places like the Wolf River Greenway, Eads and various neighborhoods around the city – where it’s all- cicada, all the time --- some people are ready for the endgame, when they can sweep up the corpses and move on.
Some people appreciate this rare feat of nature. They focus on the benefits.
"In a way, I'm kind of glad they are here because they give the birds something to eat," said Leon Flannel, who walks 3 miles everyday on the Greenway with his wife, Arlenda.
The majority of people we talked to share Arlenda's opinon.
"I was so happy to find it would be gone in 30 days and not come back for 13 years," she said.
Once their brief lives end in a few more weeks, our summer nights will return to the sweet sound of crickets and other gentler noisemakers.