NORTH AURORA, Ill. (CBS) – A western suburban woman is already counting down to 2041 because she can’t wait for the drone of 17-year-old cicadas to fill her front yard again.
Suddenly, summer sounds less loud in North Aurora.
“They were so loud you could hear them a few blocks away,” said Bettina Sailer.
Normally a shower of rain from her hose would get them moving, but Sailer has accepted that there are probably no crickets left.
‘Zero. It’s kind of sad,” she said.
There used to be more, about 6,500 by Sailer’s count. She counted and hand-picked them during visits to various suburbs and even Springfield, places where cicadas are more common than North Aurora.
Bettina Zeiler
She made 18 different trips, bringing thousands of crickets home to a netted sanctuary she built in the now shin-high grass of her front yard.
Her crabapple trees are full of tiny cicada eggs. Now that the cicadas are gone, it’s time to mow the lawn and wait for the eggs to hatch. She hopes they will show up in the area again in 17 years.
It’s a wild idea that Sailer has tried before. Her efforts made the front page of the local newspaper in 2007.
“I did this 17 years ago and we took 800, 900 crickets and released them in the backyard,” she said.
You could call Sailer an amateur explorer, a citizen scientist, or an obsessive. She showed CBS 2 some of the items she’s collected, including cicada wings fashioned into earrings, a cicada keychain, and tattoos. Clearly, the little critters don’t make her skin crawl.
CBS
“No!” she said. “I let them crawl all over my skin.”
She loves them so much that she keeps them in ink and in her freezer. Granted, Sailer doesn’t share the same affection for any other insect, but for her the cicada is one in a billion.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” she said. “Even deceased, it is beautiful.”
