Here in the northeastern United States there’s a big insect called a cicada, which makes very loud noise and moves very slowly. The most common ones here spend 17 years underground, then emerge each spring. Every year, their numbers are different, but the largest “brood” by far, last seen in 2004, is out now.

I live in central Washington, which is heavily paved and has few cicadas. My wife and I went for a walk yesterday in a park about 9 miles south of here, along the Potomac River, and there were clouds of them. They’re everywhere. They’re so dumb and clunky that they just fly into you:

And they’re loud. Their collective sound is like a sine wave, at the volume of a car alarm going off down the block:

I’m sure if the area around my house sounded like this, I’d be sick of them. But since I only hear them when I get to take a walk in the woods—and it makes the experience eerie and bizarre—I’m a big fan of the cicadas.

Oh also, we saw some bald eagles. This is the best I could do with my phone camera: