cicadas

I'll confess I don't exactly understand what I'm about to show you. It's a dead cicada in Illinois that has almost no body left, but it moves and I have video to prove it.

Summer nights around the Rockford area have been pretty noisy lately, thanks to the efforts of our local cricket and cicada populations. Why are they louder now than they were at the beginning of summer?

Summer nights around the Rockford area have been pretty noisy lately, thanks to the efforts of our local cricket and cicada populations. Why are they louder now than they were at the beginning of summer?

Cicadas show up every 17 years just in time to "ruin" your summer.

Think of what's going on with cicadas just to the east of the Rockford area as a sort of precursor to what we're going to be going through in three short years.

If the pandemic didn't already seem like enough going on, how about a massive swarm of cicadas we haven't seen in 17 years? You know those GIANT bugs you learn about in school that live underground and only come out every 17 years? Well, it's been 17 years...

Backyard hangouts are about to get very noisy. For 17 years, the Brood X cicadas have been underground and now billions of them are about to emerge.

It looks like Rockford and the rest of Northern Illinois will be spared from a huge onslaught of cicadas this year, but we're due for a huge visit in 2024.

Whenever you get a huge group of 17-year olds together, you just know it's going to be loud. Really loud. It doesn't matter whether they happen to be humans or cicadas.