By Parker
April 2025

My cicada tattoo when it was fresh 

As an American, I often find it hard to hold pride about where I’m from. Living overseas for the first time, I knew I wanted something to represent home, but there are very few symbols I could have chosen that wouldn’t be controversial or invoke mixed feelings in me. It wasn’t until my last year of high school that the idea clicked for me.  

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The so-called “brood X” cicada emergence first happened when I was 2 years old. Naturally, I don’t remember much about it, but my mother showed me pictures of me holding cicadas on my fingers and read me a storybook about how the next time the cicadas would come, I would be all grown up. I lived knowing that it would happen again 17 years later.  

Then, when I was 19, about to graduate and move to a different country, the emergence happened again. It started slowly, but over the course of a couple of days, they were everywhere. The trunks of trees were crusted in their shed exoskeletons, and the sound of their singing reached levels louder than those of a rock concert. They could be heard clearly even inside with every window closed. There were so many, and they were so slow, that you could reach out a hand and pluck one from the air at any time. We had to start feeding our dog less because she was eating so many cicadas off the ground, and we couldn’t stop her. Blogs and newspapers everywhere were even posting recipes for how humans could eat them. 

Me, holding a cicada in 2021 

I would call it a once-in-a-lifetime experience if it hadn’t already happened to me twice. It is, however, something I will only be able to experience again if I go back to specific places in the Eastern United States. It is something I will always associate with living there. On my journey of learning more about biodiversity, this is the first time I can think of where knowledge of the local biodiversity really helped ground and connect me to a sense of place. This experience was truly unique to that specific location.  

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In an increasingly globalized world, every new place I go often feels very similar to everywhere else. There are certainly differences, of course, but on a fundamental level, a city always feels like a city. Especially in the case of Scotland vs America, the two places most relevant to my current experience, since they were both colonized by the British. There are cultural differences, but are those differences really as large as one would expect given how vastly far apart they are from each other, across an entire ocean?  

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Nothing makes me truly understand how far away from home I am than learning about biodiversity. There is wildlife that I grew up with that people I meet here have never seen and vice versa. In second year evolutionary biology, one of my professors mentioned that seeing a periodical cicada emergence was one of his lifelong dreams. What I saw had been truly special; not something you get to experience unless you are in the right place at the right time. But it isn’t just the animals that you can only see once every 17 years that are special, it’s the “common” ones too. Most of my friends from the UK have never seen a raccoon, something so common at home that they are seen as pests. Hearing this perspective from new friends made me appreciate my local wildlife and see it in a new light. 

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On the other side of the coin, I was amazed at how many commonplace UK animals I had never encountered. There is very little overlap between bird species between the two places. When I first came here, I remember telling friends that the wildflowers and spiderwebs looked so perfect, like they had come out of storybooks, until I realized that the reason I thought of those shapes as ideals is because my childhood storybooks were from the UK.  

If I didn’t pay attention to nature, it would have felt like I had gotten on a plane in one city and landed in another that was functionally identical, both containing supermarkets and bars and Chinese takeaways, but looking at the unfamiliar birds made me comprehend that I had travelled to an entirely different world, an ocean away.  

On one hand, learning about biodiversity can help you understand distance and scale, but on the other hand, it can also help you comprehend connectivity. This spring, I travelled to Athens. If because of nothing other than lacking a shared language, one might expect Greece and the UK to feel more different from each other than America and the UK, but looking at the biodiversity, this is not the case. Many of the birds I saw in Greece were ones that are not as common in the UK, but still seen there, such as hooded crows and common swifts. Of course, this makes sense when thinking about it; birds don’t care about culture, only about the physical environment and proximity. 

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What amazed me most was seeing the barn swallows. They were there in the parks in Athens in huge numbers, flitting overhead like butterflies. These are a commonly seen species in the UK, but they don’t tend to show up here until a little bit later in the spring. When I saw them in Greece, earlier than they are seen in the UK, I realized that it was because I was directly in the path of their migration from Africa. This granted me a profound feeling of understanding of where I was in that moment, between two continents. These swallows do not just appear in the UK, they travel thousands of miles.  

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Furthermore, though sub-Saharan Africa may seem like a different world from Scotland, they are intimately connected by the movements of migrating wildlife. Seeing this with my own eyes helped to drive home the importance of how my own management of the environment affects seemingly distant countries.  

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One other thing that happened after starting to notice the similarities and differences in biodiversity between different places is that I also started to notice which animals are seemingly found everywhere. House sparrows and feral pigeons, for example, are abundant in every place I have ever visited, no matter how far afield. Common starlings are also one of the only birds besides those two that I see commonly in both the US and the UK. Growing up, this was normal, but after learning to be more aware of biodiversity, I realized that this would be impossible without human influence. There are some species which are long distance migrators found in both the US and UK, such as Canada geese, but common starlings, house sparrows, and rock doves (from which feral pigeons are descended) are not these species. Humans are the ones who have introduced all of these species to the US and beyond. Paying attention to biodiversity and understanding how it varies place by place made these similarities stand out to me as evidence of how the movement of humans influences the natural world.  

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There are many benefits to becoming more aware of local biodiversity. The mental health benefits that everyone usually talks about are that spending time in nature makes you more calm and more happy, and this is true, but truly learning about all the different species around me has done even more for me. I have found it to be almost existentially grounding, helping me find and understand my place in the world, literally.  

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Every single place I visit or live is both ecologically unique and interconnected with the rest of the world. Everywhere I go has humans, but no place has the exact same unique and beautiful web of biodiversity as another. When I go back to the US, I will know that the next brood of cicadas is incubating in the ground under my feet, and I will know that I am home.