Illinois is hit with cicada chaos
RIVERWOODS, Ill. — 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 ƞourishing and ƞying. 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 ƞeeting 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 ƞapping wing consent. There were places in
Illinois the decibel level hit 101, louder than a lawnmower, ƞowing in waves as an ever-present buzzing drone that seems like aliens descending in a science Ɲction movie. It is punctuated by bursts of the deeper-toned call “fffaaaro, fffaaaro.”
The sound abounds in the suburbs of Chicago, such as Oak Brook, but has already faded farther south in the state, including where two broods overlap. In an asphalt-laden DuPage County shopping plaza, cicadas mobbing the branches of the only tree drowned out the next door automated car wash’s whirring hoses and spinning brushes.
David Quinn, visiting the Chicago area from Northern Ireland, said, “whenever we were driving, we were thinking there was something wrong with the car. All that noise. It’s the bugs.”
Buggy tourism
Cicada chasers in 18 Midwestern and Southern states have submitted photos of the bugs to the Cicada Safari app, mostly concentrated in two areas, each an emergence of different broods. The Northern Illinois brood, called XIII and coming out every 17 years, is extra dense, with as much as 1.5 million bugs per treecovered acre — which is nearly a billion per square mile — in some places like Ryerson, Kritsky said. The Great Southern Brood, which arrives every 13 years, stretches from Virginia to Missouri and southern Illinois to Georgia.