Cicadas are emerging in Pennsylvania, but you may not be hearing them yet. Here’s why

People in the central and southeastern part of the state are starting to see cicadas but not hearing any sounds coming from them. It has to do with sexual maturity.

Cicadas are now emerging in central and southeastern Pennsylvania, and people should expect to see them before being able to hear their unique singing sounds.

Michael Skvarla, assistant research professor of arthropod identification at Penn State University, said on May 28 that he has been receiving reports over the past week about periodical Brood XIV cicadas being on the landscape. The large insects emerge every 17 years.

“In central Pennsylvania, in Centre County, they started emerging over the last couple of days to the earliest I’m seeing is May 25 or so,” he said. “In more southern, warmer parts of the state, down in the southeast close to Reading, they started emerging there a little bit earlier.”

He expects people will discover them in several counties including Centre, Clinton, Franklin, Luzerne, Schuylkill, York, Mifflin, Juniata, Perry and northern Huntingdon.

“These things are patchy,” he said about them not being everywhere in each county. “In Centre County, they are in Bellefonte area, but they are not in State College area,” he said.

He’s received reports about people starting to see cicadas but not hearing any sounds coming from them. “The males are the ones that sing. They are doing that to attract females,” he said. Once a cicada emerges, it takes about a week to 10 days for it to reach sexual maturity. Once that happens the males start buzzing or singing, which can be loud in some locations.

“We’re kind of in that post-emergence, pre-singing period right now. They are coming out, people are starting to see them, but they are not singing yet,” Skvarla said.

The timing may have been delayed by a long streak of cold and wet weather. “That may be delaying their maturation. They may be a couple of days, even behind a week. It may take them 14 days before they start singing just because it’s so unseasonably cold,” Skvarla said.

People can expect to hear the singing or buzzing sounds for two or three weeks. “They are on the landscape for about a month before they disappear,” he said. “You’ll probably see a noticeable decline by middle to late June and they will be entirely gone by the end of June,” he said with a rare sighting or two occurring the beginning of July.

He encourages people to spend some time looking for cicadas and if you live outside of the emergence area to take a trip and see them.

“The periodical cicada emergence is one of the great wonders of the natural world and you don’t get it anywhere else in the world, they only occur in eastern North America. This is the kind of phenomena that people who are interested in natural history will travel around the world to different places to go see and we are lucky that we have it right here in our backyard,” he said.

There are different broods of cicadas. For example in the summer of 2021, the Brood X cicadas emerged in southcentral Pennsylvania. After this year, you have may to wait four years to see another cicada. According to Penn State University, the Brood V cicadas are expected in 2029 in Adams, Cumberland and Franklin counties.

Reporting by Brian Whipkey, Pennsylvania Outdoors Columnist / Erie Times-News