How magical has been our time with Brood X

I was so glad to read Stuart Miller’s letter celebrating the cicadas’ brief time on earth (“Can we not begrudge cicadas their six weeks of adult life?” June 17). What an honor it is, considering what heroic lives the cicadas endured underground for 17 long years — and then to burst forth into the sun.

The periodic cicadas go way back and are a phenomenon not found everywhere in the world, but limited to this country’s East Coast and Great Plains states. In an article, “Magic of the Magicicada,” published in 1748, Swedish naturalist Pehr Kalm traveled to North America to observe the 1749 emergence of Brood X we are experiencing here now. He found remarkable to find them emerge one day when on the previous day, none were to be found. Their lives are truly a miracle and we are privileged to witness them and take inspiration from them.

Their genus, Magicicada, sums it up — they are magic. In this genus, there are three species to Brood X: septendecim, septendecula and the cassini. All have ruby red eyes and cellophane ribbed, transparent wings “of summer.” The big and medium septendecim and septendecula, whose songs I was unable to discern, have gaily striped stomachs. The smaller, all black Cassinis are regular songsters with a variety of warming up ticks and clicks before ascending into their wailing song. Margaretta Hare Morris in 1846 described it thus: their “call is quite different from the loud prolonged scream of the bigger species, and always begins with an introductory clip clip quite peculiar.”

The three species do not interbreed. The bigger ones seem to prefer hills, while the cassinis seem to prefer lowlands, but they’re also found all together, and I like driving past woods along the Baltimore Beltway where they are in full chorus and deafening. It’s like we’ve all been living through a documentary, like BBC’s “Earth: One Amazing Day,” except we’ve been privileged to have it extended to an amazing few weeks. To me, their song is a song of summer making anytime they emerge, like this summer, a promise of a magic summer.

Thanks to Mr. Miller, for writing a beautiful reminder about how precious the cicadas are and for setting the example to his daughter and granddaughter to turn them over when they find them helpless and struggling on their backs. I, too, pick them up and help them, and it’s been so gratifying to toss the strong ones high up in the air and watch them fly away in the sun on their missions, some of them clicking what could be a thankyou to me. Or to put the weaker ones on tree trunks to cling for safety until they get their strength back to fly again.

I, too, learned to love all creatures and practice “gentle treatment of all living things in nature” from my mother who, like Mr. Miller, offered them by example so that these traits are now simply part of us. I wish all families would do the same. Think what a magical world it would be!

Mary Beth Malooly, Baltimore