Are any of you blessed with the 17-year cicadas in your area? Brood XIII, the Northern Illinois Brood is emerging in 2024, as are the 13-year cicadas of Brood XIX, the Great Southern Brood. Despite the hype on social media, the cicada experts at UConn say the two broods will not overlap to any significant extent.
I’m most familiar with the periodical cicadas of Brood X, the Great Eastern Brood, which emerged in 1987, 2004, and 2021 and will be back in 2038. Their territory includes two places I’ve lived, Northern Virginia and East Tennessee.
We had a good amount of cicadas in 2021 but there were even more of them in Northern Virginia where our daughter and her family live. There were so many cicadas that she had to sweep them off her front porch to make enough room to walk without stepping on one.
They are incredibly ugly and it’s a shock when you first see one but after a month you get used to seeing them. My wife doesn’t like cicadas. I asked her about it and she said that one tried to fly into her mouth when she was a kid. She lived in Northern Virginia when Brood X emerged in 1970.
During previous swarms, wacky morning deejays would try to get their intern or stunt boy to eat a cicada. Nowadays we are shown cicada recipes on the actual evening news. The FDA said don’t eat cicadas if you have a shellfish allergy. I think they could shorten that to “don’t eat cicadas.” If humans were meant to eat cicadas, they would show up more frequently than once every 17 years.
My son told me about predators that actually do eat cicadas, including Copperhead snakes, birds, rodents, and so on. It helped me understand why the cicadas emerge in huge swarms. There are so many billions of cicadas that the predators gorge themselves to the point they can’t eat anymore. That still leaves plenty of cicada survivors to mate and reproduce.
I saw a video of David Attenborough standing with some cicadas. He calls them ciCAHdas. He explained that the cicadas we hear are the males trying to entice a female. The females respond by clicking their wings. David Attenborough said you can mimic the female by snapping your fingers. He put a male cicada on a twig and got it to walk one direction to follow the sound of his snap. Then he snapped behind the cicada, which turned 180° to follow the sound the other way.
I noticed in 2021 that my house seemed to be the cicada boundary for my neighborhood. There were thousands of them in the trees behind my house but only a very few in my front yard and none across the street.
The females will cut a slit in a thin tree branch to lay their eggs. In my backyard, you could see clusters of dead oak leaves on the ends of branches. For those big old oak trees, it’s like getting a haircut or trimming your nails. It’s not bad for the tree. But if you’re trying to grow a baby fruit tree, the cut from mama cicada could be harmful.
I read that I should cover my baby peach tree with netting. I saw large mesh bags for this purpose on Amazon but they weren’t going to be available until weeks later, which was too late. I read that tulle fabric would do the job, so I stopped by Hobby Lobby on a reconnaissance mission. I had no idea how to buy tulle.
Hobby Lobby was busier than I expected. They did have tulle but some kinds were selling very quickly. Apparently a lady had bought a whole bunch of tulle shortly before I got there. I figured I should get some right away even though I didn’t know how much to get.
The lady at the fabric counter was very sweet and took her time with me even though the line was backing up behind me. She helped me find the plain white tulle, just like you would use in a wedding veil. She asked me to guess how much fabric I needed. I started to gesture to represent the small tree’s dimensions and said, “ She’s about this tall and about this wide…” I felt the stares of the other customers who were looking at me in disbelief. I tried to explain, “It’s not what you think! It’s for my peaches!”
