Dylan Greene dot com

I just got back from a flashlight hike in my backyard, which backs to an Arlington county park/forest. At first I didn't see anything particular. Just your normal spiders, inch worms, and other woodland insects. Then I bent down and looked under the leaves. And I saw them.... they were everywhere!

My backyard (and yours maybe too) in less than a few hours has become heavily populated with tenerals, the cicada form when they first come out of the ground after 17 wonderful years of digging tunnels and sucking on tree root sap. In their current form they are brown, wingless, and kinda ugly. After they have molted, they'll have wings, big red eyes, and are really ugly. Males become incredibly annoying horny noise makers and females become super-selective egg layers. They don't eat and they don't sleep. All they do is look for that special cicada to come their way. Then they do the nasty, lay a bazillion eggs, and die.

National Public Radio has a recipe for cicada tacos that looks great. I'm definitely going to fry up some of these things. Think about fine wine, cheese, rum, and other fine foods - anything that takes 17 years to mature must be good!