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Of all nature’s white noise—ocean waves, rushing rivers, wind blowing through trees—I don’t think any are as hypnotic as the sound of a billion cicadas calling at once.
It was 2024, and Illinois was in the thick of a 17-year cicada emergence. After spending nearly two decades underground as nymphs, a horde of the chunky, winged insects had crawled out of their burrows at once to feed, mate, and lay their eggs. At Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve on Chicago’s west side, they were everywhere, taking to the air in clouds, ping-ponging off my son and my chests, and gathering on trees until the branches bent. The sound blanketed everything, a rising and falling buzz that echoed from miles around.
Insects, arachnids, and the arthropods like them are foundational to the world, and omnipresent in it. They make up about half of the animal biomass on earth and 90 percent of its species. From the pollinators who help trailside wildflowers grow, to the ant colonies that clean up organic debris, we’re surrounded by their work every time we go for a hike.
So why, I ask, do they get so little respect? Aside from butterflies and a few of the shinier beetles, we treat most species of bugs with derision. Some, like horseflies, are pests; others, like spiders, are boogiemen. The rest we generally ignore completely.
That’s a shame, because when we ignore the trail’s tiniest wildlife, we don’t just miss out on the majority of the animals on Earth, we miss out on some of the most interesting. I’ve glimpsed most of Colorado’s large mammals at this point, but I could see a different hoverfly—small, harmless flies that often mimic bees—every time I hike. I’ve never seen a cougar on the trail, but if I look closely, I might see a velvet ant—a huge wingless wasp covered in rust-red fuzz— scurrying across the trail.
Bug-blindness doesn’t just steal from our experience on the trail, though. The Earth is in the middle of an insect apocalypse: Studies have consistently found a steep decline in the number and diversity of insects worldwide, with one 2017 study in Germany estimating that insect biomass had dropped by 76 percent in just 27 years. And that drop doesn’t just affect bugs themselves: birds, amphibians and other creatures that make their living eating insects have shown declines over that same period as well. That decline could eventually rise all the way to the top of the food chain—i.e., us. While learning to love bugs won’t fix that trend, it’s a good first step in building up the public will to do so.
So next time you’re out on the trail, do yourself a favor. Take a few minutes and watch an anthill, follow a butterfly, or sit down and watch who skitters across the trail on your water break. If you’re feeling especially motivated, keep a diary of what kinds of creepy crawlies you see (iNaturalist is a great app for identifying them). You’ll get a window into a little world that makes yours suddenly feel much bigger.