Brood X: the Aftermath

Our 17-year cicadas are almost gone. The roar that was once, on the warmest afternoons, as loud as a gas lawnmower has faded to a whisper, and most of the cicadas you see are corpses littering the ground. But now you can clearly see the damage they do as millions of them scratch into tree branches to lay their eggs. Many trees in our neighborhood look like this, dotted with branches that have died at the tips. It looks like our small trees will all survive; there were so many in our crabapple that I was worried, but it seems fine.