News

Region Gets Cicada Mania

Though they seemed to be slow getting started, and almost entirely absent in many parts of Chicago itself, the periodical cicadas have emerged en masse in several suburban locales, coming out of the ground and into our lives for their once-in-17-years frenzy of living.

They’d already inundated the media. For months now, the popular press has been churning out stories about the impending arrival. The major news networks have run stories, at least one leading off its late-May evening broadcast by sending reporters “live on the scene” to catch the cicadas’ first emergence. (If only more happenings in nature received such coverage!) Days later, WXRT morning radio DJ Lin Brehmer featured cicadas on his regular “Lin’s Bin” feature, though he, too, wondered where they all were.

Educators have been preparing for the event, rolling out programs to connect people to one of nature’s more perplexing phenomena. The Lake County Forest Preserves have been particularly active. Their traveling “CicadaMobile” of interactive exhibits will be on tour through June and July. The district plans a Cicada Mania festival for June 3 at Ryerson Woods, celebrating the emergence with guided cicada hikes, a costume contest, and a presentation by national cicada expert Gene Kritsky. They’ve also posted an online “interactive emergence map” where Lake County residents can report sightings and help identify areas of high concentrations.

Through July 29, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum’s multimedia exhibit “Magicicada: The Magic Cicadas,” will feature “specimens from the Chicago Academy of Sciences’ collections, a 2.5-foot-long cicada sculpture, life-cycle photographs by cicada enthusiast Roy Troutman, and artists’ collection of cicada exuvia (skins left behind during the molt process).” Municipalities are getting in on the fun, too, with such events as the free cicada seminar Glen Ellyn was holding in late May.

The Internet has become a popular place for the expression of all things cicada. Ron Wolford of the University of Illinois Extension has started a blog, Chicago Cicada Central, where people can report emergences. Or visit YouTube and type in “The Cicada Chef,” where home-chef Kirk Moore deep-fries a batch of Glen Ellyn cicadas to the consternation of both his wife and his smoke detector.

Conservation stewards have been passing around a link to “17 year cicadas outbreak,” a short film on YouTube about the Brood X outbreak of 2004. With time-lapse filming, it’s a good primer for the northern Illinois emergence, capturing the drama of the magicicadas’ lives in a surprisingly affecting way.

But Douglas Kullen, an archaeologist and volunteer steward at Aurora West Forest Preserve in Kane County, has perhaps an even more special connection to the cicadas. He and his wife Roberta were so impressed by the emergence 17 years ago that they named their daughter, Katie, after it. They did it, Kullen said, “in honor of her sharing their magnificent and mysterious life cycle.” Though Katie was born in early August—by which time the annual cicadas had replaced the periodicals — the couple had been listening to the periodical cicadas all summer as they thought up names. “My wife was pretty much bursting at the seams,” said Kullen. “She liked the name Katherine, and it worked. We actually ended up calling her ‘Katie Bug’ for a long time. She was a child of the same generation as the periodical cicadas. It would be a hallmark of the day she was born.”