Before 2024, the last time the periodical cicadas descended on Illinois, I was a blissfully unaware 9-year-old in Minnesota.
Flash forward 17 years to last March. I was 26 and equally blissfully unaware of what was to come when the loud, clumsy, red-eyed creatures would make the Chicago area their home for several weeks starting in the late spring. I paid no mind to the metaphorical and physical buzz that would soon come our way.
Then I got a call from Sun-Times Managing Editor Dave Newbart, wondering if I’d want to do a preview of cicada season. He talked about it like it was a huge deal. I said sure, but admittedly questioned Dave’s idea. Would people really care about these bugs?
Oh, how naive I was. By the end of the season, the Sun-Times would publish at least 30 stories on the subject. I became our lead “cicada reporter” and had a byline or co-byline on many of them. And yes, people really cared about these bugs.
Stephanie Adams, plant health care leader at the Morton Arboretum, holds periodical cicadas, which have emerged in the Chicago area for the first time in 17 years, Friday afternoon.
After my call with Dave, I started reporting the preview. And, truthfully, I wasn’t very enthusiastic at first. I’ve never been science-y. I wasn’t one of those kids who got really into nature that way, and I had never cared to learn much about animals outside of my own dogs.
But after speaking with cicada experts locally and across the country, I started to get it. This was, after all, a big deal. There are two types of periodical cicadas in Illinois. One emerges every 13 years, and the other emerges every 17 years. This year, for the first time in 221 years, they would overlap. If something comes around only once every few lifetimes, then I had to respect it for the phenomenon it was.
By mid-May, cicadas had become my main beat. I sat in a suburban classroom and observed kids with autism and sensory sensitivities learning how to handle the cicadas’ buzzing; stood in the basement of an Avondale insect museum while volunteers created giant plaster cicada casts to decorate the city; and trekked to Highwood to try the delicious red-eyed cakes decorated to look like cicadas at Bent Fork Bakery.
Sydney, 15, learns how to prepare for the upcoming cicada emergence during a lesson Friday at Keshet, a private therapeutic day school in Northbrook for students with disabilities.
During each one of these stories, I talked and laughed with people I never would have met otherwise. To some extent, that’s the nature of the job, but something about these stories felt different.
These bugs may have been strange, buzzing pains-in-the-ass for many, but I was tapping into a nerdy, quirky cluster of the population that had a real, unbridled excitement and joy inspired by the suckers. And that was pretty admirable.
“For us, it’s spiritual,” Nina Salem, founder of the Insect Asylum museum in Logan Square, told me as she explained why she wanted to get involved in a public art project celebrating the emergence.
Sun-Times reporter Mary Norkol on assignment
Then, May 17 rolled around. After hearing some rumblings that the cicadas had truly arrived, I called the Morton Arboretum in west suburban Lisle to confirm. Yes, indeed, they were buzzing about the grounds.
So I joined photographer Ashlee Rezin in heading to the arboretum. Plant health care leader Stephanie Adams showed us around, grabbing cicadas in her bare hands with a confidence I’ll never understand.
She laughed, answered our questions and put cicadas in her hair while Ashlee cursed and did deep-breathing exercises. A class-act photojournalist with a grab-life-by-the-horns attitude, Ashlee has been around some truly crazy things, but apparently bugs are the one thing that can shake her.
Stephanie Adams, plant health care leader at the Morton Arboretum, lends an arm to some periodical cicadas, which emerged in the Chicago area for the first time in 17 years last May,
That didn’t stop her from getting one of the best photos I saw all season of a cicada spreading its transparent wings and flying off Adams’ hand. That photo led the front page the next day.
The front page of the Chicago Sun-Times on May 18, 2024.
The stories I wrote over the following weeks were proof that my early questions about people caring about cicadas were extremely shortsighted.
I wrote about people getting tattoos of the bugs and traveling thousands of miles to see them. And then there’s the story that still comes up often among my group of friends, who were repulsed and confused.
“They really eat them?!” they said, jaws agape, after I told them what had happened at work the previous week.
Yes, there was an even smaller group of cicada enthusiasts who looked forward to snacking on the critters. Turns out, they aren’t bad. Just ask Sun-Times photojournalist Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere, who tried one for himself. Tyler met up with the bug snackers on a day I was unavailable (I promise that’s not just an excuse, though it is a convenient one — I did try a seasoned cricket as part of the reporting for this story).
As my reporting continued, a theme emerged.
Yes, it’s a cool phenomenon, emblematic of the wonder of the natural world. But even on a personal level, the cicada emergence is oddly symbolic.
It happens in 17-year chunks (or 13-year segments downstate). It’s not a round, easy number like 5, 10, or 25. It’s an anniversary that’s not connected to anything tragic or political. It’s just an opportunity for people to look back on how things have changed and how things have stayed the same since the last time the buzzing began.
“Just like how a cicada changes so quickly [from] a nymph and then sheds its shell, I’m not the same person I was 17 years ago,” Jessica Flink, a Crest Hill resident who has a tattoo of a cicada, told me.
Jessica Flink, of Crest Hill, shows off her tattoo of a 17-year periodical cicada.
Perhaps it’s a bit strange to attach so much meaning to these bugs, but eventually I caught myself doing the same.
I think about that 9-year-old girl with a puffy red ponytail and wire-rimmed glasses. If you told her she would grow up to live in Chicago and eventually write stories for a living, she would simply gasp. And it took a lot to get her speechless.
Next time these guys come around, I’ll be 43. Whew. God only knows where I’ll be then. I could be doing anything, anywhere.
But one thing I know for sure: Whether I’m here or not, I’ll hear about the cicadas in Chicago and remember my time as a young reporter, meeting some of the city’s finest bug nerds, reporting on an impressive biological occurrence and doing a surprising amount of reflection on myself and my life in the process.
And I’ll think of the Sun-Times’ next cicada beat reporter with fondness, compassion and a strange connection only a few of us share. As Sun-Times editor Scott Fornek did for me in an essay recounting the four different times cicadas appeared in his life, I’ll pass along the baton and urge them to take care of this beat — it’s far more important and more interesting than you’d think. Take it from me.