Brood XIII: Billions of Cicadas Party in Midwest

Campton Township Highway Commissioner Sam Gallucci said he saw a few behind their office on Route 47 north of Route 64.


And a first-grader at Ferson Creek Elementary School in St. Charles brought a cicada to school last week – in a zip-lock sandwich bag, LRC assistant Ann Evans said.


“Our kids are very excited about it, we are counting down each day,” Evans said. “We have a big huge cicada display.”


The school features everything from cicada culinary creations – chocolate-covered, stir-fried and fondue – to hand-drawn and paper origami cicadas.


Cicadas are going to appear wherever they appeared 17 years ago – provided development has not destroyed their host trees, Daniel Summers, a Field Museum entomologist, said.


“They survive by sucking on the roots of trees,” he said. “The more undisturbed areas, such as small forest preserves, will be carrying about 1 million per acre.”


Cicadas have a black body and orange veins in their transparent wings. The larger of three 17-year species is an inch-and-a-half long with a two-inch wing span. The two smaller species are an inch long with one-and-a-half-inch wing spans.


They don’t bite or sting, and their single purpose is to mate, lay about 30,000 eggs and die, entomologists say. Residents should not spray them – even if their yard is covered – because they won’t damage landscaping.


Their damage to tree branches is minimal, Kritsky said, resulting in a natural pruning, though homeowners can wrap young trees to protect them from the eggs.


Cicadas are just annoying because they are so noisy. The male cicadas’ buzz is so loud, they can be heard a quarter-mile away, entomologists say. The 90-decibel racket is a love song. The boys are pitching woo to silent females who respond by a coy wing-flick of interest, Kritsky said.


“When they’re all together by the hundreds in a tree, it’s shimmering with sound,” Kritsky said.


St. Charles Township Highway Commissioner Ron Johnson recalled how loud they were last time.


“In 1990, I had just got my first set of hearing aids and went to a conference in East Peoria,” Johnson, 65, said. “East Peoria was lousy with them. I did not hear them until I put those hearing aids in – and oh my god, were they loud.”


While they do not eat during their brief adulthood above ground, cicadas are high in protein and low in fat, making them good eating for others.


“Everything eats them – dogs, cats, squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, opossums. It’s like being inundated with hundreds of flying Hershey’s kisses,” he said. “They’re irresistible.”


Kritsky has eaten them deep fried, baked, on pizza and in pies.


“They taste like cold canned asparagus,” he said. “Others say they taste like raw potato.


Recipe for cicada pie published in 1902 by the Cincinnati Enquirer:


Take 50 newly emerged white female cicadas and remove the wings, legs and head. Chop up the cicadas into pieces and place in a bowl with stale bread that has been soaked in milk. Add sugar, rhubarb flavor and cream to soften the ingredients. Put the mixture into a pie crust and cover with strips of pie crust placed in a cross pattern similar to that of an apple pie. Bake in an oven at 400 degrees till crust is done.


17-year cicada timeline:


• Late May through early June cicadas emerge


• Early through mid-June, females lay eggs in new growth of trees


• Mid- to late June they begin to die off and give off a smell as their bodies rot.


• Early August, eggs hatch, nymphs fall and burrow into the ground to begin the 17-year maturation process again


• This year’s hatchlings will emerge in 2024