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Our long cicada nightmare is almost over.
"The end is beginning," says University of Kentucky entomologist Lee Townsend, adding that in some places, it's possible to hear birds singing again because the numbers of screeching insects are diminishing.
It can't come too soon for Cassie Wingfield, whose encounter with three of the crazed, red-eyed insects caused an unfortunate clash of automotive metal.
Or for Ross DeAeth, who kept playing the bagpipe as a cicada crawled across exposed skin between the bottom of his kilt and the top of his sock.
Or Julie Smoak, who was forced to improvise an anti-cicada cage on her tractor when the sound of its mower sent them into a frenzy.
We asked readers for their stories of these once-every-17-years visitors. Here are three of the best responses:
• It was the day after Cassie Wingfield's last day of classes at South Oldham County High School, but the exhilaration of impending graduation went south in the driveway of her Orchard Grass home, where a Bradford pear attracted an especially heavy infestation.
Cassie left for work that fateful day, then realized she had forgotten her purse.
Her father, Pat Wingfield, picks up the story:
"Being late to work, she called her little brother on the phone to bring it out to the driveway for her. When she rolled down her window to get the purse, three of them flew into her car.
"She panicked out and jumped out of her car, thinking she was in park. Well, she was in reverse and backed into her sister's car, causing her door to get thrown back and drug all the way down her sister's car."
The damage to Cassie's 1997 Honda Accord: $2,400. For sister Brittany's 1995 Mustang convertible: $2,300.
In her defense, Cassie said she didn't know that the menacing insects don't bite or sting.
"I learned that the day after the wreck, actually."
• A few weeks ago, Lexington's Ross DeAeth was participating in a bagpipe competition at the Glasgow Highland Games at Barren River Lake State Park. ("Yes," he says. "Competitive bagpiping. Go figure.")
The cicadas were so loud they were drowning out the sound of the bagpipes.
DeAeth understands that some people might not consider that a problem.
But the insects themselves, flying around and landing on everything in sight, spelled trouble for the pipers. That's because a piper in competition is supposed to remain still, with only the fingers moving on the chanter. Fidget and you lose points.
"Tell that to the cicada that landed behind my knee," DeAeth said. "Between the hose (socks) and the kilt, the knee is the only area of exposed flesh available, and that's where this particular bug decided to dig in. I know they don't bite, but the prospect of a northerly migration was disconcerting to say the least."
Being a man of steel nerves, DeAeth didn't freak. His band, the Kentucky United Pipes and Drums, managed to finish in second place.
He was playing again early this week on a golf course, and noticed that he seemed to be attracting cicadas.
"I'm sure there's a relationship between bagpipes and cicadas," he said. "And with some serious government funding, we may be able to get to the bottom of it."
• Just maybe, Julie Smoak thought, Betty, the 1954 Ford 600 tractor with a mower attached, looked like a gigantic cicada. Why else was she being mobbed Sunday while mowing 10 acres of lawn near Athens?
It's hilly land, and it wasn't safe to steer a large machine while swatting madly as the bugs dive-bombed her like something out of a Hitchcock movie.
So she hopped off the tractor and made a run for the house.
"I was throwing things off, a ballcap, my iPod, trying to get them off of me," she said.
She regrouped and came up with what she called "a rudimentary approach, the work of a desperate woman."
Over Betty's roll cage, she stretched the kind of netting used to keep birds off fruit trees. Now when she mows, the netting is in front of her, and behind. She left the sides open for safety reasons, but takes some satisfaction in swatting away careening cicadas with a gloved hand.
A dozen or so cicadas ride on the outside of the netting in the front, another 40 or 50 cling to the back. But the human and the insects have reached what Smoak calls a "sort of negotiated truce."
What happened to Smoak is not unique.
Townsend, the entomologist, said something about the sound of lawn mowers and tractors seems to attract both male and female cicadas. Maybe bagpipes work too.
Cicadas have one of the strangest life cycles in nature. The bugs now inflicting themselves upon us -- a tribe known as Brood XIV -- went into the ground 17 years ago, and have spent all those years in a nymph stage, sucking on sap from tree roots.
In May, when the temperature was just right and the ground was damp from rain, some signal told them to tunnel to the surface, where they crawled up trees and other structures and shed their shells.
This happened across a dozen states. It was heaviest, although quite spotty, in Kentucky. Many factors, including development, influence where they're found and where they're absent. Now they've mated, and the females have laid eggs that will become nymphs and burrow into the ground. Their three weeks or so of life above ground is about over.
But when they come back, in 2025, Smoak and her Betty Ford netting will be ready for them.
