Chicago Hit With Cicadas

The ground had seemed to undulate at night, alive with bugs. Crawling cicada nymphs, striving to get higher after 17 years underground, marched en masse toward and up trees, pausing to shed their skin and emerge as adults. And then the fun began.

Cicada chaos is flourishing and flying. Trillions of once-hidden baby bugs are in the air, on the trees and perching upon people’s shirts, hats and even faces. They’re red-eyed, loud and frisky.

“What you saw was biblical,” said biologist Gene Kritsky, who has been chasing periodical cicadas for 50 years, yet was still amazed by the 3 to 5 million cicadas crowding a small patch of Ryerson Conservation Area north of Chicago. “There are things I’ve seen this time that I’ve never seen before.”

It’s an only in the United States spectacle, the last of the triple crown of rare forecasted natural wonders.

First, there was April’s solar eclipse, followed by May’s Northern Lights unusually far south. Now the great dual periodical cicada emergence of 2024 — an event of a magnitude not seen since 1803 — has burst from below to join the earlier shows in the sky. It’s lasting weeks longer than the other two fleeting natural rarities, but in many places the cicada invasion is starting to wind down.

The males are singing for sex and won’t stop until they get a female cicada’s flapping wing consent. There were places in Illinois the decibel level hit 101, louder than a lawnmower, flowing in waves as an ever-present buzzing drone that seems like aliens descending in a science fiction movie. It is punctuated by bursts of the deeper-toned call “fffaaaro, fffaaaro.”

Source: AP