First time in 221 years? I thought about Carl Segan who used the term "Billions and Billions" when describing the universe.

I suspect there age going to be a bunch of very fat and happy birds along with other insectivores this year.

Always thought those were a mid to late summer thing.

Is that a recent story?

If so, someone ought to be gathering bunches to sell to those on the Caveman Diet.

Cavemen would likely have been gorging themselves on them. Who needs to risk getting trampled by a mammoth when you could pick more than a day's worth of calories before lunch???

I put some of those little Once Every 17 (bullllllllllsheeit) year fuggers on a hook and tried fishing with them. Could see down 6ft into the water. Bounced it off of a bass’s head about 10 times. Completely ignored. It literally scared bluegill away.

Ya didn't spray it with the WD-40, did ya?

about half my labs and my one setter loved to munch on the things...

99,850 views 19 hours ago
Two broods of the insects are creating event that hasn't happened since early 1800s.

I'm going to have ear plugs ready just in case the sound isn't soothing to me.... My imagination might go towards alien invasion

We had a big hatch year 40 some odd years ago and any place there was a green, leafy tree or limb hanging low over the water you could cast a dark color lure under it and WHAM... it might be a largemouth, it might be a crappie or catfish or rock bass, sometimes drum or carp. It didn't matter if you used popping bugs, jigs or crank baits... they were on a feeding frenzy.

Song of the South.

Who tha fuqk predicted it 221 yrs ago

Aren’t we lucky???? Transients, illegals, and now cicadas.

They hatch once the ground reaches a certain temperature, 55* if I remember right.
Damn good catfish bait. The kids caught a bunch, so Dave and I took the kids fishing.
I never even had time to drink my beer! I was always busy taking fish off!
The kids were happy to catch them, but scared of getting stung. 😀
We just had the 17 year batch in ‘21, so if I see another, I’ll be freaking 75 years old.
By that time, those kids oughta have figured out how to take a catfish off without getting stuck!
Reon

Cicadas breed and die. The rest of the time they spend underground. The others breed and breed and more breeding. And they sure don't disappear for years st a tine.

It’s every summer

Regular cicadas and katydids, I personally enjoy the sounds of summer.

It takes 17 years to run a life cycle, that does not mean you only get cicadas every
17 years. Just that brood.

There are a lot of broods.


Good chance you can find them every year, just not as many as the big brood hatches.

1974 was the worst I've heard in my area. weeks, if outdoors you couldn't hear yourself think.

Tried to do a bit of fishing that year, forgetabout it. No peace while in a boat or on the river bank. Dead bugs coating the surface of the river. The fish wouldn't bite on anything I presented, they had plenty to eat.

50 years ago, nothing to compare here since.

Exactly

But there are the cyclical ones with red eyes that everyone FAWNS about

And them there are the seemingly annual emergence of the larger ones that look like Hot Wheels little green army school buses.

My labs enjoy crunching them when they get played out and crash land on the patio concrete. They don’t eat them. Just crunch them in half

we had a pile of 17 year old cicadas some 30 years ago. they were everywhere. me and grandpap (RIP) were camping at Raystown Lake and cicada was the only thing that a fish would bite. bluegill, crappie, perch, largemouth bass, pike, musky, strippers, catfish, carp.... if it swam, cicadas was it to catch them. the brood comes out after 17 years, but i never seen millions of cicadas again at my home.

i have seen another cicada storm in southern WV in the late 90s.

We get crickets, night hawks, and frogs.


I like the sounds too.

I’ve made a giant set of copper pipe windchimes, enjoy hearing them too. Some of my pipes are 3ft long.
The wind cutting thru the trees and rain pinging my metal roofing is good noise. Especially for sleeping on a slow afternoon.

Wait for it........................



still waiting???






We all know who..................










Q........!!!

Lady where we stayed this weekend had a nice set, sounded great in the breeze. Thought to myself I should hit a scrap yard or maybe some new construction.

Jim, frogs are starting up good here. Still a mite chilly for crickets in the evenings. Nighthawks probably at least a month away still?

But, the snipe are here! Weird sounding birds.

Sounds sort of like tinnitus.

Robins right before dawn is my favorite sound.

The time varies by the brood. Some are annual, some, like this one, is 17 years. This year, the 17 year brood coincides with a 13 year brood. These 2 broods haven't emerged in the same year since Jefferson was president. For the most part, the broods' ranges don't overlap so we won't be getting a double dose except in a few small areas. Those areas are going to get noisy, though.

During the summer, the night sounds of insects and tree frogs along our coastline are amazing. It is part of what makes our coast so special, IMHO.

I seem to have different "favorites" depending on the time of year. I love hearing the sandhills when they arrive. The snipe are cool too. There's a couple of little waterways and seems every season there's a pair or two of willets that nest in the sagebrush near our seasonal creeks.

Right now I get serenaded by the meadowlarks every morning, along with the regular noise from the jays I feed.

Always look forward to the booming dives of the nighthawks.

Used to have some great horned owls around, not many rabbits or squirrels left, someone mentioned a disease. Somewhere I might have a picture of one of the owls sitting on our fence waiting to get to the dog pool for a drink or a bath. Wife was up early one morning and caught one taking a bath. I miss their hooting. Had a skunk in the driveway the other night and I could use a nice big owl around to remove every last one of them from around the place.

Geno, we just had a robin show up yesterday.

First one.


Meadowlarks are generally 10 to 14 days behind.

There aren't as many sounds as when I was a kid....and not just because of my hearing loss and terrible tinnitus.

Outside on a summer night the crickets, etc are very loud...when I'm wearing my hearing aids. When I'm not, they're all out of my hearing range and it's dead silent.

Maybe it was the paraquat used where they migrate to???

We're lucky enough to have good crops of juniper berries every couple of years. Robins will overwinter sometimes. Maybe some of our are headed your way, we had thousands in the area, now only a few (likely residents). They head up into the higher country as it starts to warm up.

Love to listen to the Katydids. Cicadas, not so much. It does have a tone very similar to tinnitus!
You can hear them even with earplugs in during the 17 year cycle.
Outside of the 17 year brood, I have only ever seen very few. Maybe I’m not looking very hard.
During 21 I was in Wells Valley, and they were all over the place on Sidling Hill, but in the valley itself I didn’t see as many as I did in Pleasantville over in Bedford County.
Could be less forest, more farm land in Fulton County.
Mom had passed on Thanksgiving in 03. We held the funeral the first day of deer season. So in mid May, Dave and I and Dad were putting up a Tombstone and fixing up the cemetery plot for Mom.
Dave’s kids and Ben musta caught several hundred, looking for the mythical “blue eyed” bug.
Since they had so many Dave and I took the kid’s fishing that evening.
Now some people love to fish. Me? I like to sit by the water, talk, and drink some beer!😀
We we’re catching so many fish that night that my beer was actually getting warm until I could finish it! Dave and I were constantly taking fish off, because the kids, all between 10 and 14, were afraid of getting stung by catfish.😭
I finally quit baiting my hook so I could finish a beer while it was still cold.😀
Reon

We went to Great Lakes when son completed basic. They were out then. You could hear the buzz driving down the freeway

Ive always heard copperheads love them some cicadas.

Favorite sound has to be Spring Peepers.
I’ve never understood how a cold blooded critter is out singing in February or March. At night.



Rarely hear them anymore or it would be Whippoorwills.
When I hear one,
It’s summer in the late 70s,
Pap and I are sitting on the canvas covered glider on his porch, he is lighting a Pall Mall with a Zippo.
Occasionally whistling back to the bird.
He passed 1979.

Today I can smell that first puff mixed with Zippo fluid.
Misty eyed, must be allergic to the smoke.😏

Every seventeen generations for the 13 year cicada and every thirteen generations for the 17 year they emerge at the same time.

Will they crossbreed? A complicated question…..

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19cvph1/will_the_13_and_17year_cicadas_crossbreed_this/

…but you can bet entomologists will be out there looking.

Up in NY State the katydids in the trees hang on well into the fall, by November there’s just a few left dropping out one by one, low and scratchy in the cooler nights. Finally a hard frost comes in and takes what’s left out.

Someone mentioned spring peepers. A favorite of mine too. The last time I’ve heard them was on White Mt NH in June, high/cold enough up they were still peeping, maybe 2003.

If I were a richer man retired I would travel up to the NE in March just to hear them again.

We get some every year. In this region the big hatch occurs every 17 years: 1953, 1970, 1987, 2004, 2021 in my lifetime. I was still working in 2004, and some of the locations I covered on the night shift were in suburban Northern Virginia where there are a lot of mature trees. There seemed to be billions at each place. One of our buildings had the entire back wall covered with them, attracted by the bright lighting. Out in front of another location on the Arlington County/Alexandria line, Route 7 was slippery with crushed ones.

While turkey hunting in 21, I saw deer scarfing them up in a meadow. Just about everything eats ‘em. Every so often a bird will fly by with one in its beak. Those REALLY make a racket!

I was reading this article and found this interesting. They can screw up the acorn production cycle on oak trees.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-double-brood-of-periodical-cicadas-will-emerge-in-2024/

And female cicadas also damage trees directly by slicing into twigs to lay their eggs. Although these two types of damage rarely kill trees, the effect is enough to reset the clocks of trees such as oaks, which typically undergo “mast years” in which they produce large batches of acorns every few years in synchrony. After accumulating damage during a cicada emergence, these trees produce lean harvests for two autumns in a row and then a feastlike burst of nuts two-and-a-half years after a cicada emergence, Lill says.

Turkeys should eat good, they love those things.

I think there is a 13year too. The last 17 year brood we had in Ga was crazy, just a buzz all day long 24/7 til they were done. Wasnt just at night.

The spring peepers started here about a week ago.

The aluminum tubing from the old foldable lawn chairs makes good windchimes. My Wife has several of them all around the yard.

Never heard that they damage trees but I did hear about copperheads having a taste for them.
I was only 5 in 1970, and I was in the service in 1987, so 04 was the first I really first saw them.
And I always think about not getting a chance to finish my damn beer!😀
Reon

We get the small hatches every year, never thought much about them.

A couple years ago I was at Camp Atterbury, IN for an exercise in 2021 when they had one of the 17 year broods and it was amazing. Holy chit were those things loud, they drowned out the sound of the generators from a distance. At the peak, you couldn't walk from your car to a BLDG without having 3 or 4 of them land on you. By the end of the exercise they had just about disappeared though.

I can't find it now but I read an article that said just the opposite - some researchers think the trees undergo a cyclic change and that's what triggers the cicada emergence.

The ones that will he hatching out in Alabama are the 13 year cicadas. I especially remember the 1998 and 1985 cycles. Both times the dead ones piled up in windrows along the side of the roads. The fish got so gorged after awhile it was nearly impossible to catch them using anything. This sound is like the hum of an engine flywheel amplified 100 times. For some reason I don't remember the 2011 hatch at all.

We don't have any locally that I've ever heard. Here in Idaho, we have several species but they're all the annual types. I grew up in Boise and we'd hear them there every spring.

They can kill a young tree. They killed a peach for us the time before last. They zip open a young tender limb, afterward it dies and falls off.

On a bigger tree, it’s no big deal.
Our peach had only been in our ground since the previous fall. They killed too many branches, it died.

They don't harm the trees so to speak, but they do prune them in a way. It's kind of like God's natural way to prune the trees every 17 years or whatever. The bug cuts into the bark on the ends of the branches and they lay their eggs. Then, the last foot or so of the branch dies and falls off onto the ground. That's how the eggs get into the dirt.

They must taste good because it seems like all of the critters like to eat them including dogs.

Maybe those Billions of Robins ol' mike saw migrating will eat those Billions of cicadas and there will be a happy ending to this.