MACON — That buzzing, humming, beyond-a-thrumming sound reverberating across Middle Georgia?
The one that might make you wonder if the fellow next door left his two-cycle weed whacker whirring full throttle in the top of a tree?
Maybe you’ve heard it. Maybe it has invaded your otherwise quiet neighborhood. Maybe it has bugged you.
Then again, it is a bug.
The 13-year cicadas — the males among them anyway — and their anything-but-ear-pleasing mating calls are revving up for the first time since 1998. That’s when their daddies struck up their own springtime racket and, before long, eggs were laid.
For the past decade-plus, these members of periodical cicada Brood XIX, or Brood 19, as it is known, have been living underground. During the next couple of months, they’ll perch in treetops and make their music — and their babies.
Then they’ll die off, says Willie Chance, a former Houston County extension agent who has written about the noisemaking nymphs for the University of Georgia’s Center for Urban Agriculture.
“Whether there’s gonna be a lot of them, I don’t know,” Chance said. “But they’re so noisy it doesn’t take many. ... It’s like a little drum almost that’s inside the males.”
It is rare to find or hear them much farther south than Macon. Though they have jack-o’-lantern-orange eyeballs and similarly eerie-colored veins in their wings, they’re harmless — to people and plants.
“But it’s something fun to look for,” said Chance, a horticulturist by trade.
These periodical cicadas — not to be mistaken with another local variety that typically makes itself heard during the summer — emerge in 17- and 13-year cycles. Georgia is home to three broods of the 17-year type that will next emerge in 2017, 2021 and 2025.
Brood 19 is Georgia’s only 13-year sort, and they are already making themselves heard.
The whining throb they emit during daylight hours has roused the locals. A woman in Crawford County said her daughter thought a tornado siren was wailing.
Janet Mitchell, who lives in northern Bibb County, thought they might be locusts.
“They make one heck of a noise. And they shut up about 7 o’clock at night,” she said of the nagging, high-pitched drone, adding, “They have to come this year.”
Her husband, Bill, likened the hum to the bees-in-your-ears sound of those vuvuzela horns that swarmed last summer’s World Cup.
“Just a horn-blowing, but in a real faint way,” he said. “My neighbor, she was doing her walking, and she stopped by. She said her and her husband rode around and thought maybe it was somebody’s alarm going off. ... I said, ‘No, I think it’s just that bug.’”
About the Author
