Brood X

One of the largest broods of periodical cicadas in the nation, Brood X will emerge this spring in 15 states: Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, as well as Washington D.C.

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Kansas is not on the list! :grin:

This is from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 19, 1998:
For the first time since 1777, the largest brood of 13-year cicadas is emerging at the same time as the largest brood of 17-year cicadas
I was in MO for that hatch and cannot even begin to describe how deafening those cicadas were on our farm. Anybody else remember that summer?

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Duplicate thread :relaxed:

i think those buggers hatched in 89’. i remember bivouacing in the alabama woods in boot camp and no matter how tired you were you couldnt sleep from the noise they made. its amazing a bug thats 17 yrs old can make such a racket! ill take the noisey crickets anyday.

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I had a couple hundred young trees during the hatch 17 years ago. They got shredded! This year I am going to make the trunks and undersides glow white with Surround to get them to fly elsewhere. Even if you are spraying poisons there are too many.

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Ok I will disregard my own call to kill this thread LOL

I’m really interested in the Surround approach BUT do we know it works on cicadas, from experience?

I may have picked a challenging year to plant my food forest yard! I guess it’s in my best interest to pot as much as possible or keep everything under some sort of barrier /netting while the plague occurs…

Great, another “plague” to deal with. The hits just keep coming…

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As long as you keep rolling with the punches, everything will work out!

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i wonder if it would be a good call for you southerners to raise yourselves a large, free roaming flock of guineas this spring? the way they love insects you probably wouldnt need to feed them much once moved outside. wont get them all but i bet it would put a good dent in population in the orchard at least. if the food is nearby they wouldnt have a reason to roam out of thier/ your yard.:wink: . when i had them, they would move into the old field next door in june/ july to get the grasshoppers. would see them jump up out of the grass to snap the flying ones out of the air.

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Would chickens do the trick? We have a coop, but no birds, but my wife keeps insisting on getting some. I’ve resisted for years, but may have to give in. We also have a new dog and cat, so don’t know how we could have chickens roaming around with them on the property as well.

definitely! id get breeds that are known as good foragers. if you introduce your dogs to them early on, they will generally leave them alone. only my male heeler will chase them around a little but doesnt try to bite them. my rooster usually retaliates and runs him off. lol!

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Chickens , guineas ,etc . May help ?
But what I remember is that there are just too many cicadas for everything to eat.
Foxes, coons , crows, turkeys, all laying around with full belly’s .
Just too many all at once. When a large brood hatches.

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From the news site-

And you can eat them

If you’re so inclined, cicadas can even make a low-fat, high-protein snack. Dried cicadas provide a crunch with a nutty, earthy taste, according to those who’ve tried it. In their softer form, before their exoskeletons harden, others say the cicadas are shrimp-like. A group at the University of Maryland even published a periodical cicada cookbook titled Cicada-licious, featuring recipes for dishes such as Cicada Dumplings, Emergence Cookies and El Chirper tacos.

No, thanks…

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I know the birds will be so full of these bugs that my small fruit will be in an abundance. Cherries will not need netting!! :smiley:

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Same here. I had just planted some fruit trees and I really underestimated what cicadas would do. It was like a REALLY severe pruning. Fortunately they seem to stick to branches below a certain diameter, so the trees were all fine in the long run. But I was freaking out while it was happening.

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Ha ha Noooooo!! You could have a hundred chickens and the bugs wouldn’t stop. The numbers are truly overwhelming and they are strong flyers. They aren’t crawling on the ground most of the time like grasshoppers. They fly all over. If you haven’t lived through it you can’t understand. It’s crazy.

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Yeah, I figured the chickens wouldn’t be able to get to the ones more than a foot of so off the ground.

I vaguely remember them as a youngster, but haven’t experienced them since.

This is my third time. In 1987 they almost shut down my high school graduation because so many people were refusing to stand outdoors for so long listening to the droning and dealing with the flying bugs all over. I worked at a park with a lake and we would watch huge fish cruising the lake wolfing down bugs. Fishing was nearly impossible because you just couldn’t compete with thousands of huge drowning bugs. Even driving down the highway you can hear them droning! In 2004 I was in my first house for just a few years and had a huge garden and had planted all kinds of fruit and non-fruit trees. They were demolished. My son was crawling and he would grab them and shove them in his mouth. It was disgusting hearing the crunching. I will never forget trying to claw them out of his mouth. Mind you this was the days of slow dial-up modems and no one really had cell phones yet except the old crappy ones with no camera. This summer it’s going to be insane. People are going to go crazy despite all the warnings because there is just no way to prepare yourself for the madness.

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Wow, that’s crazy stuff. Sounds almost Biblical in scope. I’ve got 27 fruit trees, so I don’t know how to prepare for this. I have a bag of Surround, but don’t know effective it’ll be with cicadas.