The cicada chaos is flourishing and flying, and it will continue to do so for at least a few more weeks in the Chicago area. Trillions of once-hidden baby insects live in the air, in trees, and on people’s shirts, hats, and even faces.
The sound is abundant in Chicago’s suburbs such as Oak Brook, but has already faded further south in the state, including where two broods overlap.
That hasn’t stopped cicada superfans from making an elaborate field day (or rather field month) with the rise of the twins.
One fan has posted more than 4,600 cicada photos to the app
Mayumi Barrack sees a pair of mating periodical crickets coming together, pulls out her phone and says, “Hi guys!” and takes a picture of them.
“I’m not really a bug person, but the more I look at them, the more I think they’re cute,” Barrack explained, noting that many other creatures – birds, squirrels, raccoons and more – are just as eager to get close to the animals come. insects, if only to make food from them. “I just want to document that they existed.”
And boy has she. Barrack has posted more than 4,600 photos of the insects on the Cicada Safari app for cicada enthusiasts. That is 2,000 more than its nearest competitor. She’s the queen of cicada hunters, although she doesn’t actually hunt – most of the photos are from her backyard – and she sees herself more as a mother to the insects than a queen.
Carolyn Kaster/AP
“I take care of them,” Barrack said, standing in her tree- and flower-filled backyard in suburban Chicago.
Periodic crickets are strange, with eccentricities like a super strong urine stream and a zombie fungal infection. But their superfans are also unusual, or at least very passionate.
Gene Kritsky, a professor of biology at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, has been working for decades on this year’s mass cicada emergence. He first heard about crickets in 1972 and has been studying and pursuing them since 1974. He wrote the book about the current rise, ‘A Tale of Two Broods’. He also created the cicada tracking app that enthusiasts like Barrack use to post photos and discover where the insects are in large numbers.
This is the third time that Kritsky has mapped Brood XIII of the crickets. That’s quite an achievement, considering they only appear once every 17 years.
Carolyn Kaster/AP
Kritsky and his artist wife Jessee Smith often wear a safari hat that makes him look like the Indiana Jones of crickets, as he is sometimes called, and have driven back and forth from Ohio to Illinois several times this spring to enjoy the insects. Over several long nights in a forest north of Chicago, he saw huge numbers, including his first one-in-a-million blue-eyed cicada. He called the May 24 turnout “incredible,” with thousands coming to his location that evening.
“Periodic crickets are the gateway to natural history,” Kritsky said.
For chefs, crickets sound like “bon appétit”
For New York City chef Joseph Yoon, crickets aren’t just great, they’re dinner. His company Brooklyn Bugs is on a mission to raise awareness of the taste and sustainability of edible insects, even though he knows many people are disgusted by the thought.
Yoon spent nine days in Illinois collecting, freezing and then bagging tens of thousands of crickets. When he got home, he served tempura cicada to 400 people at a Syracuse University event.
Yoon said that collecting and cooking cicadas is “quite painful for me because I love the cicada so much.”
But he added, “At the same time, I can also recognize and appreciate that each life of these crickets represents a potential to transform someone’s perception or opinion about eating insects.”
Carolyn Kaster/AP
Yoon’s friend, Wisconsin artist and professor Jennifer Angus, also sees the beauty of crickets and other insects—so much so that she incorporates the actual insects into her art. Sometimes she put them in outfits and posed them as dolls.
“I love them because they just have amazing faces and bulging eyes and they’re very hardy,” Angus said. “They can withstand the wear and tear at my exhibitions.”
“I find their faces humorous,” Angus said.
Cicadas caused a striptease for a Kentucky teacher
Renee Martin teaches interior design at the University of Kentucky and also dabbles in puppetry. For a puppet festival in Cincinnati three years ago — when Brood
“What would I do? A striptease with cicadas?” she asked her friends, who said a resounding yes.
She came up with “something between a doll and a costume” for that festival and then brought it out again for this year’s big turnout, putting on a show in a Cincinnati alley for friends, neighbors and visiting journalists.
Martin, dressed in fake fishnet stockings and moving comically to stripper music, starts out as a cardboard pale nymph and then bursts into full-grown red-eyed nymph. The crowd amplified the effect with noisemakers and shouts of “ooh la la” and “sexy cicada.”
Meanwhile, photos of crickets are flooding into Kritsky’s app, where almost 5,000 people post messages. About 150 people have posted at least 100 cicada photos, but none come close to Barrack, who said she was surprised to find herself in charge.
“I have so many pictures that I haven’t sent yet,” she said.
