The Central U.S. is swimming in cicadas this summer. The 13-year Brood XIX is the flavor of periodic cicada emerging in Tennessee over the next few weeks.
Brood XIII (no, not Taylor’s version) is a 17-year species, and will also emerge in 2024, but the broods will only overlap in a very small section of Central Illinois.
Brood XIII will make its presence known with authority primarily in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin, while Brood XIX will be heavily concentrated in southern Illinois and Missouri, as well as scattered throughout a number of Southern states.
For those of you who just don’t have enough bug-related social media networks in your life, the app Cicada Safari encourages users to shoot both stills and videos of cicada sightings and upload to their map.
The Nashville area is a hotbed of entries on the Cicada Safari map, jumping from a couple of hundred entries last week to more than 2,000 at the beginning of this week. That number will certainly grow exponentially over the next month and a half.
As far as chronicling your own cicada memories, former USA Today photo editor Jym Wilson, who now works with the online news outlet Springfield Daily News is Missouri and will have ample opportunity to photograph the emergence this summer, offers these simple tips:
“1. Practice making in-focus photos on your phone; many people don’t know that they can touch the screen and that will be the focus point. Some models of smartphones will focus very close.
“2. Look for cicada nymphs emerging from their shells. Great for a sequence of shots or time lapse video.
“3. Look for situations to put the cicada in context with its location and to give it scale.”
-- Lucas Hendrickson