Cicadas are coming

[adrien schnee]

Apparently the NE to the Mid West of the US is set to become beset with billions of cicadas from about May as part of a regular 17 year cycle. These are juicy bugs for trout and a staple for fly fishers in places like NZ. I’m curious if they played a part in your fly fishing during previous emergences, such as the last one in 2004 - and if you have plans to incorporate them into your fishing this year?

[Loogie]

Big bugs are fun, I am always looking for opportunities to fish big Cicadas. I have never seen a big hatch of them though, even though some have been forecasted. Maybe this one will come to fruition and the bugs will be out in force. I have plenty of them on my lake in southern VA, I have never caught a bass or pike on a cicada dry though, and not for lack of trying!

[Cimarron]

A staple in NZ for sure, and intensely loud to boot. But I always just caught the tale end of them and never had a real heyday. I have a number of them still in my fly box but not sure if they’ll make it to the Southern Rockies.

[NewUtahCaneAngler]

This reminds me of a camping trip at flaming gorge about 5, maybe 6 years ago. Right at dusk, our entire campground was bombarded by cicadas. The screaming started at one end and continued through the entire campground, if you had a spare hoody, you could have easily traded it for a nice bottle of single malt. We must have had 500 in our campsite alone in a period for about 20 minutes.

[cappy]

I'm in the NE and when the 17 year cycle rolls around they are everywhere. Driving at highway speeds with windows up you can still hear them. No plans to target fish with a cicada fly, however I have a small black panfish popper that will be a perfect match if any are on the water.

[Tommasini]

It's been 17 years already? I remember fishing a stream that borders the Appalachian trail in NJ last cycle and you couldn't help but step on them.

[Short Tip]

Getting ready.....

[Caneghost]

The 2021 brood is southeast PA so it may not impact any top notch trout waters. We fished one in Southcentral PA years back and had some good fishing. That was on PA's Little Juniata River which was medium low flow for the time so we stayed in mid river and made long casts to the shaded banks. Most fish that took them blew up on them, but a couple just sucked them in quietly. The subtle takes brought better hookups.

The buddy whom I fished that with asked if I had seen any in the Catskills. I have not, though there is a brood that emerges southeast of here that could affect some parts of the Catskills. The maps are very large scale so it is hard to tell from them. Trouble is that one doesn't emerge again until 2030. Don't know if I'll be around then. The J gets then in '24 I believe, so I might try to go down and give them a shot, but it can be iffy like any hatch. If you hit the timing right, when they are getting on the water, but before the trout become glutted, its a hoot. If you don't hit that window its a bust, at least in my limited experience. We had a few busts in Western Maryland before we hit it right that day on the J. Penn State etymologist Greg Hoover has a great pattern for them.

[mlarocco]

Remember when the locusts swarmed Nairobi. Street kids never had so much protein (shanty towns ate well also)

[JMQ4]

Unfortunately, appears that brood X will go around us

[spruce grouse]

They’re big in Maryland. It varies from locale to locale, from a nuisance to biblical. They made for great fishing 17 years ago and I can’t wait. The brookies I caught in western MD that summer were the biggest I’ve seen there on average. I remember fishing the Gunpowder and watching a natural drift by me. About 100 feet downstream the bug just disappeared in a gulp. My biggest ever Gunpowder brown was caught on a cicada pattern that day. It’s like hoppers in August in Montana.

[LeoCreek]

If you've ever had to live in a warmer climate when the cicadas hatch out in "Biblical" numbers....it's not that fun to listen to the buzz all day and all night. When I was a kid, I went fishing with my grandpa and grandma and we stuck live ones on a hook to catch some bluegill and bass, but I never had the chance to fish a cicada hatch with the fly rod...I've heard it can be pretty awesome.

[bassman]

They’re big in Maryland. It varies from locale to locale, from a nuisance to biblical. They made for great fishing 17 years ago and I can’t wait. The brookies I caught in western MD that summer were the biggest I’ve seen there on average. ...

Maybe those two things go together. Given the chance to get all the natural high protein available in cicada the trout bulked up in short time. I saw this happen the year after the march of the army worms in northern MN. The moths the following were so thick the trout we caught in the streams and even those in Lake Superior had stomachs stretched to capacity with moths and sizes went up a little across the board from most people's information on their catches. I felt it was a banner year even though the fish were well fed they were on a seeming eating frenzy all summer.

[Bill Terry]

Here is the standard New Zealand cicada imitation, one with rubber legs and one without. They are very effective, although some fish have seen too many of them and won't take them anymore. The Sharpie is for scale.

[Havana]

This is very interesting, I'm in VA and knew they were coming, hadn't thought about the fishing potential. Aren't they terrestrials? If so, would windy days be best, like a hopper?

[kimk]

I grew up in Southern Ct. and in the late 50's? when I was in grade school we had an incredible crop of "the 17 year locusts". For weeks the constant droning never let up. Like a white noise cranked up to eleven. Every footstep crushed a half dozen or more. Like walking on living corn flakes. Pretty much stripped the trees. I thought of it as a great exciting adventure but an older girl just down the hill totally freaked out.
I lived there until I was in my 20's and my parents lived there until just a few years ago and we never saw a repeat hatch of that magnitude.
AgMD

[spruce grouse]

This is very interesting, I'm in VA and knew they were coming, hadn't thought about the fishing potential. Aren't they terrestrials? If so, would windy days be best, like a hopper?

Yes. Although, where they’re really heavy it doesn’t much matter ‘cause they’re everywhere.

[billems]

1. Buy some feathered badminton shuttlecocks at a sporting goods store. 2. Dye them black. 3. Tie it onto a big bass hook. 4 Go fishing.

[McHull]

Getting ready.....

Nice!! I'll take a dozen please!!

I'm also in Maryland and I'm really looking forward to casting big bugs to trout and bass.

[Brooks]

I posted a short blurb in the fly tying section “biblical plague” thread about Cicadas and thought I’d expound here. I’ve included some photos that are not mine—I cut and pasted from the web:
A Davie MacPhail Muddler, a New Zealand sculpin (cockabully), and a New Zealand Cicada.

I haven’t had much cicada experience in North America, but have fished to trout eating cicadas quite a bit in New Zealand. I thought I’d share a trick that worked well for me, and maybe one of you will have the opportunity this year to try (and maybe modify) what I’ve done in NZ, and let us know if it works for you.

In New Zealand I would tie and fish smallish, sparse muddler minnows, tied without weight, so they would float (at first).
The Davie MacPhail photo is similar to the ones I tie, but I tie them with sparser and more ‘scraggly’ heads.

I’d cast the muddler to a spotted fish. It would land with a soft splat, sending out concentric rings (in still water). Sometimes I’d give it a slight twitch to get the fish’s attention. Often a big brown would circle the now still muddler and then eat it.

If the fish refuses and swims away, I’d give it a strip to pop it under the surface, and then strip it in. Now it imitates a cockabully sculpin (real nice imitation actually).

I’ve literally had browns chase the fly and beach themselves chasing it down.

In moving water, the reaction is the same, but the fish doesn’t get to contemplate the muddler very long—usually a cast, splat, drift, and then strip if necessary.

Most of the New Zealand cicadas that I saw had some yellow on them, which the gold and turkey and deer hair imitate well, at least as a fuzzy imitation.

You might modify the muddler if you try this in NA with darker materials if needed. Let me know if it works for you, I’ve sure had fun success with this technique in NZ


Davie Macphail small muddler minnow



NZ Cicada



NZ sculpin