Illinois is in an uproar, but there are no cicadas in Bloomington-Normal

You know, “Buzz, buzz, buzz.”

Yes, those supposed billions of cicadas.

For months, their arrival has been hyped, warned, heralded, of two periodic broods merging to create our biggest cicada plague in 221 years, since 1803. That’s even before Abraham Lincoln, the Louisiana Purchase and a line in Chick-fil. -TO.

Websites have been created (Cicada Mania, Cicada Safari, Illinois Cicada Watch).

Stores sell special nets for cicadas.

We’re told that male cicadas come to hang out in our trees, sound their nightly sirens while looking for a date to, you know, get to know each other, maybe swap stories of favorite soil samples, and then mate beforehand. returning to the ground until the late 2030s. (Sorry for being so graphic, but sometimes it’s necessary.)

Where are they? I haven’t heard any.

They always are, for the summer.

Poets talk about the tranquility of winter snow, or the spring sounds of nature coming to life, or the pleasant sounds of autumn, the soft rustling of leaves, or the sound of a distant train, or the tuba of a marching band on a Friday night. .

The hum of herbivores and the moan of grass blowers shaking the sidewalks.

Someone in the neighborhood set off those fireworks too soon.

The garbage man, on his morning rounds.

Crows cawing just after dawn.

The beep-beep-beep of construction trucks backing up.

“Like secondhand smoke, all the summer noise can affect people and…eventually affect our hearing,” says Deb Pitcher, a longtime Twin City audiologist. “There is also that ‘annoyance effect’. Studies have confirmed that excessive noise increases blood pressure and heart rate.”

Then, with a foreboding, he adds one more sentence:

“And cicadas ‘singing’ at the same time have been recorded at over 90 decibels; in fact, they can be deafening.”

Many areas of Illinois are already reporting rampant encroachment.

In Lincoln, in Kickapoo Park, a video circulating on the Internet shows trees and bushes literally saturated with bug-eyed, alien-looking insects.

A photograph taken in Rochester, southeast of Springfield, shows a tree that is so covered it can barely be seen.

They are, Facebook people say, buzzing around Lake Bloomington and Lake Evergreen.

At the Illinois High School Association state track meet in Charleston, competitors literally had to shake off their cicadas before running.

A niece from Naperville sent us a video/audio clip this week of her own cicada concert and the deafening buzz that blankets the western suburbs.

“It’s so noisy here all day,” he says, “I don’t even hear it anymore. “We have disconnected it.”

And yet, Bloomington-Normal?