Cicadas remind me of the “Selenites” from the 1964 movie “First Men in the Moon”, based on the H.G. Wells novel of same name.

If you are lucky enough to be in the right place this year:
SOFT-SHELLED CICADAS
Ingredients:
1 cup Worcestershire sauce
60 freshly emerged 17-year cicadas
4 eggs, beaten
3 cups flour
Salt and pepper to season the flour
1 cup corn oil or slightly salted butter
Directions:
Marinate cicadas alive in a sealed container in Worcestershire sauce for several hours. (Note: You can skip this step and go directly to the egg step instead.)
Dip them in the beaten egg, roll them in the seasoned flour and then gently sauté until they are golden brown.
Serves four

We had them in Vancouver. When we were kids we'd tie firecrackers to them and let them fly away.

Well being from Louisiana I'm used to them. But since my Tinnitus sounds like them I hear them year round. Night and day.

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Originally posted by Beancooker:
Nope. We have them here in central AZ. Lots of them and they are loud AF. I like the sounds of them. I saw green army men tied to them, we used to have little kites. Tie some fish line to a leg, and off they go.

I was kind of surprised when I first heard them here. There are none out where I live (the ecosystem is called "creosote flats"), as our largest "trees" are scraggly mesquites and palo verdes that grow near the washes. However, when I went to town, where there are large mature trees (town is near the Hassayampa River), they were very evident. They are Apache cicadas, native to the Sonoran Desert.

My Dad was transferred to KCMO when I was a year old and we lived there for ten years. I thought the "locusts", as we called them, were just a normal part of your life in the spring and summer. After moving back to New England - CT until my adult escape to NH - I haven't heard or seen them since.

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Originally posted by David Lee:

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Originally posted by parabellum:
Obviously, you are not from the South. Summer wouldn't be the same without the cicadas.

These are said to be coming up after 17 years below the ground. Perhaps its eggs hatching. I understand they come out almost to the exact day.

It’s amazing that their biological clock can time to a 17-year interval. It’s even more amazing that all of them keep synchronized with each other to the same 17-year period.

I grew up in a small town in MO. Summer evenings there were delightful. Ciradas humming, lightning bugs flashing, the Milky Way glowing (skies were dark then), and heat lighting on the horizon. Thanks for stirring up that memory. BTW, our cicadas were annuals.

The sound is very distinctive and I recall it well growing up in Pennsylvania. There would be summer nights when they were VERY loud, but it's a sound I associate with summer and childhood so it's actually sort of comforting and not at all scary or creepy.

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Originally posted by architect:

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Originally posted by sig 226:
They taste like chicken...

Well, Ellie, my former yellow lab would agree, Last go-round, in 2007, she ate probably thousands of them. Acted like it was quite a treat.

I've had labs almost all my adult life. You never realise how many things are edible until you own a lab.

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Originally posted by charlie12:
Well being from Louisiana I'm used to them. But since my Tinnitus sounds like them I hear them year round. Night and day.

My hearing is just as yours. Too much exposure throughout the years to harmful noises.

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Originally posted by 2BobTanner:
Cicadas remind me of the “Selenites” from the 1964 movie “First Men in the Moon”, based on the H.G. Wells novel of same name.

Thats them right there.. . I cant imagine millions of them.

The story here is that copperheads love them when they're newly emerged. They will sometime congregate around trees at night waiting for them to emerge.

RMD

I agree with several here. My tinnitus sounds EXACTLY like them. It is how I described it to my V.A. doctor.

OK, thus far I have seen 2 cicadas. Neither was alive. The first was standing on a concrete step, most of the way out of its shell. It had huge teeth, pissed off huge red eyes, sort of a horse fly crossed with a African killer bee what jumped the fence on a locust which has lineage to a sabre tooth tiger. Pretty scarey looking to say the least. He never moved and didnt make a sound. He was not alive. Seen one other which was not alive. Only cicadas I have heard were very loud in the background of a Langdon drill video.

That photo looks like the ones in Texas. Big green bugs. Harmless. Have them every year. Noisy part of Texas summers.

Man, one of the good things about living here in the North Pole is that we don’t have that kind of bugs. I don’t miss the gigantic cicadas and roaches of my tropical native country.

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Originally posted by Jupiter:

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Originally posted by sig 226:
They taste like chicken...

Don't give Tyson Foods any bright ideas.

They're all over the country and we even have them here in the Arizona (Sonoran) Desert. When I was a kid, I'd find them in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley and even in some of the vegetation bordering the beach in Malibu! Never in the quantities I'd see/hear in the Midwest, when my Dad lived in Indiana (CRAZY numbers there), but I recently learned something interesting about Cicadas: They happen to be among the favorite foods of certain snakes, particularly Copperheads!!! These will even climb trees to feast on the insects!

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Originally posted by David Lee:
They are coming up out of the ground in May.

Won't need to aerate the lawn this year...

The easiest way to get rid of them is to catch them, tie a firecracker on them, light and release. The way we kids did it in the 1950s!