The cicadas are coming to Georgia. Why the clamor won't be quite as loud as last year

Taylor Croft, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Mar 18, 2025

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ATLANTA — Cicadas, those loud, large but harmless insects, will soon emerge this spring after 17 years underground in Georgia.

This brood, called Brood XIV, will begin their first mating season since 2008, invading northeast Georgia and 13 other eastern states.

But these bugs won’t be nearly as noisy or as numerous as last year’s “Great Southern Brood," which popped up around the state from Augusta to Macon, Milledgeville and in Cherokee County.

“Georgia is just barely included in the range of this year’s periodical cicada emergence,” said Nancy Hinkle, an entomology professor at the University of Georgia, in a Tuesday interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “There’s only going to be probably four, maybe five counties involved in the very northern most part of the state.”

This brood has only been recorded in the northeastern corner of the state, where they’ll likely begin emerging in April when the ground gets warmer. The Georgia counties most likely to see them are Fannin, Lumpkin, Rabun and Union counties, Hinkle said.

This spring’s periodical cicadas are not expected to appear in metro Atlanta.

The central patch will likely inundate Tennessee and Kentucky, stretching as far north as Ohio and as far south as Georgia. Smaller concentrations will also be found along the east coast up to Massachusetts.

Within about two months, they’ll be gone.

This group of cicadas are the second-largest periodical brood after the “Great Southern Brood,” named Brood XIX, which emerged in Georgia and other states in 2024, Hinkle said.

“There were billions of them, so there were areas where they were so concentrated that they actually produced a racket that people found annoying,” Hinkle said. “There won’t be that many cicadas emerging this year, so nobody will be annoyed by this year’s chorus of cicadas.”

While green annual cicadas can be heard each year in late summer, these black, red-eyed periodical cicadas only emerge in the spring to mate every 13 to 17 years, depending on the brood.

First, they crawl out of the ground and shed their outer layers before flying into the trees.

Then the singing starts: The males sing or buzz to attract females with which to mate, and the females lay their eggs in the tree bark.

Soon after mating and laying eggs, they die. Their bodies return to the earth and leave behind the next generation that likely won’t be seen until 2042.

They are “perfectly harmless,” Hinkle said, since they don’t bite or sting or even destroy gardens.

Later in the summer, the annual cicadas will come out. August is the best time of year to hear them in Georgia, Hinkle said.

“Those are the big ones that you hear every afternoon when you get home from work just before sunset,” she said. “They’re always singing late in the afternoons, and it’s just the sound of summer to most of us.”