As third-graders at Cumberland Elementary in suburban Chicago colored, cut and glued paper to make cicadas with foil wings, they confided their fears about what’s about to happen in Illinois.
“Some people think cicadas can suck your brain,” said Willa, a red-haired 8-year-old in a Star Wars T-shirt.
“They’re going to be so loud,” said Christopher, 9, as he intently colored his cicada. “I hate noise.”
“It’s kind of scary,” said Madison, 8, as she picked through the markers scattered on a green table. “What if they do something to me?”
Don’t worry, Madison and Willa: Cicadas don’t actually bite and prefer to suck tree sap. (And Christopher, earplugs might come in handy.)
Illinois is the center of the cicada outbreak in the United States, the only state that will experience cicadas almost everywhere and see two adjacent broods — Brood XIX, or the Great Southern Brood, and Brood XIII, or the Northern Illinois Brood — to come from the soil at the same time. The double appearance of the two groups of cicadas is happening for the first time since 1803 and is expected to last about six weeks.
Any day now, scientists estimate, the state will be a carpet of buzzing, crawling, red-eyed insects.
“What’s special about these two broods is that they cover almost the entire state of Illinois,” said Allen Lawrence, associate curator of entomology at the Peggy Notebaert Museum of Nature in Chicago. “So for us in Illinois, you’re not going to be able to get away from them.”
Cicada mania is spreading across the state. Cicada fans excitedly make plans to camp, hike, or just enjoy the insects in their own backyards. Out-of-state visitors drive or fly from places where there will be fewer or no cicadas. A cicada-themed public art project in Chicago will adorn the city with hundreds of elaborate replicas of the bugs.
And schools are preparing their students for the appearance of the cicada, hoping that the education will ease anxieties and wrap up in a real entomology lesson.
“I try to desensitize them a little bit,” said Jelena Todorovich, the art teacher at Cumberland, who is planning a school-wide “Cicada Parade-A.” “It will be real.”
People who cringe at the idea of a trillion cicadas crawling around half the country, covering grass and roads and crunching underfoot, may find the coming weeks revolted. But there is also fascination and delight, a fervor echoed by the recent solar eclipse, which captured the attention of millions of Americans who stood in awe of a rare natural phenomenon.
“People say, ‘It’s a plague, it’s scary, it’s in my hair,'” said Roger McMullan, who has written a graphic novel called “Cicadapocalypse” and plans to fly to Illinois for the emergence. “But they don’t bite, they don’t sting, they’re not venomous or venomous. They’re just these sweet kids hanging out and drinking tree sap.”
The cicada is no ordinary bug, its biggest fans say. It evokes nostalgia, they say, a soothing sound of summer, bringing a calmness bordering on the spiritual.
Nina Salem, the founder of Insect Asylum, a small museum in Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood that makes plaster cicadas in its basement, said that on the eve of the emergence, she was thinking about the cicada’s life, which is spent mostly underground. .
Once the cicadas use their front legs to emerge from the ground, they molt and then mate, male cicadas make the familiar buzzing sound that can be overwhelmingly loud when at their peak. After mating, female cicadas make crevices in tree branches and lay their eggs there. The eggs hatch and the tiny pupae burrow into the soil, starting the process all over again.
More often than not, adult cicadas die after only a few weeks of above-ground life experience, their bodies falling close to where they emerged.
“They spend their whole lives waiting for this moment to be seen, heard, felt and experienced, and then we’re going to do this with them,” Ms Salem said. “It’s so fleeting. It’s just really special. And then we walk and collect them like little treasures.”
Erica Kain, a German teacher in Sewickley, Pa., has plane tickets booked for Chicago in mid-May for herself and her teenage daughters, Caroline and Genevieve.
The girls spent much of their childhood in California, where they didn’t see cicadas, she said. But in 2016, on a drive in eastern Ohio, a cicada brood had recently appeared. The bugs were absolutely everywhere, he recalls.
“They were banging on the windscreen — it was so loud,” Ms Kane said. “The girls had never experienced cicadas of any kind before. We all loved it.”
On their planned family trip to Illinois this month, they plan to drive to central Illinois, to the place where the two cicada broods will almost overlap — “a little Mason-Dixon grasshopper line,” as Ms. Kain called it.
She can’t wait to get out of the car and let the sound of the cicadas surround her.
“It reminds me of when you go to the symphony and you feel the vibrations of the instruments in the hall, that loud roar,” Ms. Kain said. “It’s like walking into a nightclub with insects.”
When the cicadas will emerge from the ground is the subject of feverish online speculation.
Some cicada fans have taken to sticking meat thermometers into their backyard soil, waiting for the temperature to reach 64 degrees Fahrenheit about six inches deep. Once this happens, the cicadas are expected to emerge.
That fact has left some Illinoisans worried.
A brood of cicadas that emerged when Trace Zimmerman, a reporter in Chicago, was a child in the suburbs, has haunted her ever since.
She remembers standing outside her house, staring at the dark, slightly shifting bed of cicadas covering the sidewalk. Some of the cicadas were alive, but many of them were dead and motionless, their red eyes large and empty, Ms Zimmermann said.
She and her younger brother, Jeff, carried brooms, tasked with cleaning the sidewalk by sweeping cicadas off the grass.
“It was like snow, covering everything,” he said. “But they were bugs.”
Although she doesn’t worry about many cicadas in West Town, her neighborhood near downtown Chicago, she visits her childhood home several times a week to care for her mother. There, he’s already seen holes in the ground near large, mature trees, a sure sign that cicadas are coming.
As a way of managing the stress of the cicada, Ms. Zimmermann has was created T-shirts, replacing the four stars on the Chicago flag with cicadas.
At Cumberland Elementary in Des Plaines, cicada art has already been plastered in the hallways and every classroom in the school has received cicada training.
Lynora Jensen, a master naturalist whose daughter teaches fourth grade at Cumberland, is a regular at the school, gently trying to calm concerns and help students get into the cicada spirit.
“For me, it’s unacceptable to be afraid,” he said. “Education helps them not to be afraid and to be curious. We want to make kids feel good about it.”
Willa, one of the third-graders at Cumberland, said she had heard many students talk about how scary cicadas can be. Try to spread the word that they are friendly.
“They’re just bugs,” he said.