About 10 days ago Kirsten noticed a cicada on my lawn. I put it on the retaining wall and took a few closeups with the digital camera. They're pretty neat looking bugs. (This is about 2.5 times life size.)

The 17 year cicadas were here in 1987 and so aren't due 'til 2004, but different species of cicada have different cycles (like 7 or 13 years) and I asked Ben about it. He said that this fellow was probably from "Brood 10", which is due for an emergence this year.

For some reason my front porch is unusually popular with this brood, and since Kirsten found that first cicada I've been visited by close to a hundred. There are usually 8 or 10 on the white molding around the front door, and sometimes as many as 20. The nymphs (or whatever the wingless, brown guys are called) come out in the early evening and find their way to a vertical surface, whereupon they work their way out of their shell and transform themselves into cicadas. When they first emerge they are almost entirely white. The other night around midnight I shined a flashlight onto one of them and took another closeup. The photo turned out well, I think.

Ben says they're white because the chitin hasn't hardened yet. He observed that this is the best time to eat a cicada. I wish I could explain that to Ursula, who seems to have developed a taste for the crunchy green ones.