the creepy crawlies are here!

it's about damn time! i'm finally seeing cicadas, almost a month into the invasion of brood xiii. however, the weird thing is, i'm seeing them downtown.

see, the creepy red-eyed buggers (unless they've got blue eyes.. huh, reminds me of a new order song) are out in droves, but only in certain parts of the city and suburbs. beverly in the south? check. downers grove? check. park ridge? my coworker lives there and man, do they gross her out. but around my neighborhood, i've seen nothing. neither have a lot of city-dwellers.

the theory is that brood xiii cicadas kind of got displaced during their 17-year hibernation due to 1. lack of a thorough root system (they burrow into the roots of trees), and 2. increased construction and ground turnover. easily believable, with the amount of development i see in some places. so in my mind, it would make sense if the severity of the swarm was ringed out in the burbs where there's more stable greenery, then lessening and lessening as you get closer to the epicenter of chicago, the loop.

like i said, it's all theory.. which was blown out of the water yesterday when i saw a live cicada in my office building lobby, right outside the elevators. i actually nudged it with my shoe, not knowing what it was and thinking it was dead. since i hadn't seen one, i didn't know it was a cicada at the time. then today after work, i saw another live one crawling near an underground parking ramp. i went to take a pic, but i forgot my non-digital macro sucks, so it flew away before i got a chance. i saw two more on my way to the train station, their bodies mangled by traffic.

it's weird, but pretty amazing at the same time. i lived out in the burbs during the last cicada freakout, but i don't remember a thing about it. it either wasn't that great or i was living in the wrong burb. but now, i can say yeah, i saw cicadas. i was part of the process. why, though, am i seeing them in what should be a cicada ghost town?