Bobby Zylstra\u2019s morning started a little slow, with cool weather and low clouds hanging over Missouri\u2019s Current River on Friday. After wading a ways downstream, he started seeing a few rises here and there, and soon enough he hooked his first brown trout on a cicada pattern \u2014 a big, foam fly with a black-and-orange belly, rubber legs, and beady red eyes. As the day warmed, Zylstra heard cicadas start to sing in the treetops. He also noticed more fish rising to the bugs.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI just saw, chomp, chomp<\/em>, more consistently. And then I started seeing [trout] cruising around in really odd water, like a foot-and-a-half deep. They were looking up and actively hunting for cicadas,\u201d Zylstra tells Outdoor Life<\/em>. \u201cThis one fish was probably 10 feet in front of me, so I flipped my cicada over there and he swam over, probably about four feet, and just chomped it.\u201d<\/p>\n That one fish was a 21-inch brown, the biggest Zylstra had ever caught. But he\u2019d beat his own record twice that afternoon \u2014 first with a 23-inch brown, and then with a 26-incher \u2014 as he brought countless fish to hand, all on the same cicada pattern. At one point, he forgot to reel in as he bent over to pick up some trash in the river, and a trout hammered his fly as it hung downstream in the current.<\/p>\n \u201cI heard this explosion behind me, set the hook and caught a 17-inch fish,\u201d he says. \u201cBut it was just that kind of day.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n For anglers looking in the right places, there could be more of these days on the horizon. The cicadas are out, and even if you haven\u2019t heard these insects in your neck of the woods, you might have heard that 2024 is a special year for the big, noisy bugs. This spring and summer will mark the largest emergence of periodical cicadas<\/a> in more than 220 years as two different broods emerge simultaneously in certain corners of the country. For anglers in these areas, this means a massive influx of large, edible insects that, under the right conditions, could lead to some of the hottest surface fishing in recent memory.<\/p>\n All told, entomologists (bug experts) expect trillions of the bugs to emerge between now and the end of June. This is already underway in parts of the midwestern and southeastern U.S. \u2014 the core range of periodical cicadas. Some anglers there have already seen the flip switch, while others are anxiously awaiting the bugs to show up in sufficient numbers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Just like most types of fishing, the key to capitalizing on the cicada emergence is being at the right place at the right time. There are several factors at play when chasing a hatch, however, and even if you do find yourself amid a cloud of cicadas, this doesn\u2019t always translate to lights-out fishing. Or, it could be biblical. Just ask Zylstra.<\/p>\n Read straight-through this article, or click on any of the topics below to jump straight to them.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019ll ever experience anything like it again. It was just such a phenomenon, like seeing the Northern Lights,\u201d says Zylstra, who lives in Jefferson City, Missouri, and grew up in Chicago. He still vividly remembers his first experience with periodical cicadas when he was four years old on a trip to the zoo with his family: the incessant buzzing and crunching sounds of bugs underfoot as they rained from the sky and fell from the trees.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s just an incredible memory that\u2019s stuck in my brain. And then I recently got into fly fishing about four years ago, so it all started to click,\u201d Zylstra tells Outdoor Life. <\/em>He bought David Zeilinski\u2019s recently published book, Cicada Madness<\/em><\/a>, which has quickly become the go-to resource for cicada-curious anglers. <\/em>\u201cI started tracking and learning about it, and listening to [Zeilinski\u2019s] podcasts, and then Friday just ended up being the perfect storm. On Wednesday, I\u2019d heard from a guy on Instagram who I\u2019ve talked to before, and he was like, \u2018It\u2019s going off on the Current.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n For many people, especially those living in the Midwest and South, the loud buzzing of cicadas is synonymous with peak summer, which is when annual cicadas<\/a> (also known as dog-day cicadas) emerge from the ground to take flight, mate, and die. These gray-and-green insects emerge on two- to five-year cycles, but the generations overlap so that they show up in decent numbers every year.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n There is another type of cicada that emerges from the ground less frequently but in numbers that far overwhelm their annual cousins. Known as periodical cicadas, these insects show up every 13 or 17 years, depending on the species. Their bodies are black-and-orange, as opposed to gray-and-green, and they\u2019re a bit larger than annual cicadas. They also have bright red eyes, whereas annual cicadas have black or brown eyes. And when they do finally emerge, they do so en masse<\/em>, crawling out of the ground by the thousands.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s highly unusual, especially for something as small and typically short-lived as an insect, is that they live underground for 99.5 percent of their lives, only to emerge for several weeks as adults,\u201d says Dr. Barrett Klein, an entomologist and biology professor at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse<\/a>. \u201cAnother interesting aspect [of these emergences] is that you can time them with such precision that you can go out and experience not just millions, but billions or trillions of these cicadas arising from the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n As scientists have tracked these events over time, they\u2019ve categorized the seven species of periodical cicadas that are native to the eastern U.S. into 15 numbered broods. Brood X, for example, emerges every 17 years in parts of Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, with the last emergence taking place in 2021. This is different from Brood XXII, which emerges every 13 years in Mississippi and Louisiana, and which emerged last in 2014.<\/p>\n Once in a great while, the timing lines up so that multiple broods emerge at the same time, and 2024 is one such year. For the first time since 1803, Brood XIII (known as the Northern Illinois Brood) and Brood XIX (known as the Great Southern Brood) are emerging simultaneously.<\/p>\n This has people like Klein understandably excited. Last week, he traveled with a group of students to witness the phenomenon in central Illinois. He calls this area an \u201centomo-Mecca\u201d because it\u2019s really the only place in the country where the two broods are emerging at the same time in the same general area.<\/p>\n \u201cIt really centers around Springfield, Illinois, so we made a big circle on Tuesday, and we\u2019re confident that we hopped into the right area because we saw all three species,\u201d Klein says. \u201cI think our visit was a little early, because the sound wasn\u2019t deafening. I mean, we had cicadas all over the tents and all over the trees, but it takes them about five days after they emerge to really get their voices. So, we heard distant calling but it wasn\u2019t a cacophony.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Naturally, the sound of millions of bugs singing in the forest is also a symphony of dinner bells for fish and wildlife. Small mammals and game birds like grouse and wild turkeys will feast on the bugs, as will black bears and other foragers. Even humans can get in on the action, and Klein points to a rich history of indigenous peoples eating cicadas, along with a host of modern-day recipes<\/a> for preparing them.\u00a0<\/p>\n And from a fish\u2019s perspective, a once-in-a-lifetime hatch of big clumsy bugs might be too good to pass up. At least that\u2019s what many of us are hoping for.<\/p>\n In an ideal scenario, you\u2019ll be on the water when there are enough bugs around for the fish to key in on. All kinds of fish species will target cicadas, but for many anglers, trout and smallmouth bass are the two main quarries. Trout are especially predisposed to eating them because aquatic insects make up the majority of their diet in most places.\u00a0<\/p>\n One of the best ways to fish the cicada emergence is with a fly rod, says Augustus Knickmeyer<\/a>, a Missouri-based guide who fishes primarily on rivers in the southeastern corner of the state. Cicadas are bugs, after all, and fly fishing at its core is a means of imitating natural insects. This isn\u2019t to say conventional tactics won\u2019t work, however, and Knickmeyer says these anglers can still catch plenty of fish on topwaters when the fish are cooperating.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s possible to bait a live cicada on a hook because of how large they are, but floating imitations will typically fare better than sunken bugs. And when the feed is really on, the fish might ignore everything else in the water. Zylstra says that when he talked with other anglers on the Current last week, none of them were catching much \u2014\u00a0but they also weren\u2019t using cicada patterns.\u00a0<\/p>\n There are plenty of cicada flies to choose from. Most of these patterns fall into two categories: the hyper-realistic bugs<\/a> that look almost identical to the real thing, and what Knickmeyer calls \u201cimpressionistic\u201d bugs, which look a little bit like a lot of things.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some of Knickmeyer\u2019s favorite cicada flies are variations of the same basic foam bugs that imitate beetles, grasshoppers, and other insects. One of his go-to patterns is essentially just a larger Chubby Chernobyl<\/a> tied with black and orange foam and rubber legs. As for Zylstra, he\u2019s been fishing some large foam bugs that he bought on Etsy<\/a>. He even painted up the orange underbodies with a black Sharpie to give them more contrast on the water.\u00a0<\/p>\n Read Next: <\/strong>The 12 Best Bass Flies for Catching Largemouth and Smallmouth<\/a><\/p>\n A few basic bass poppers in the right sizes are other good patterns to carry, especially when targeting bronzebacks. These flies can move water and make a lot of noise, which helps call fish to the surface.<\/p>\n Conventional anglers have plenty of lure options, too. Just like with flies, there are some highly detailed topwater lures like the Grand Siglett<\/a>, but most of these will cost you a pretty penny. Simpler alternatives include smaller plugs like Jitterbugs<\/a> and small Torpedoes<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s important to work these patterns slowly and not aggressively. Cicadas are big, clumsy land-based bugs, so they can\u2019t swim or move through the water very well, and oftentimes they\u2019ll just twitch or flap their wings occasionally as they drown on the surface. And while it might seem counterintuitive to some dry-fly purists, you\u2019ll want to cast with a little more force so the fly or lure lands with a splat<\/em> on the surface.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOn the smallmouth side of things, it seems like most people\u2019s tendency is to skate their flies or chug a popper really loudly,\u201d Knickmeyer says. \u201cBut that just seems to spook the fish. Generally, I\u2019ll have [a client] make a cast, letting it slap down, and then let it rest for a while until the rings dissipate from around the fly. Then, if anything, just kind of wiggle it.\u201d<\/p>\n Zylstra says most of the trout he caught last week came on a classic dead drift, which means letting the fly move naturally with the current and not imparting any action. He was wade-fishing solo, and because the trout were feeding so aggressively on cicadas, at times he was able to get within a rod\u2019s length of a rising fish.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019d see an explosion, and then give him a minute to digest the cicada he just ate. You know, let him reset. And then just flick it over there. You still had to get a good, clean drift, but if you did, he\u2019d just engulf it.\u201d<\/p>\n Periodical cicadas can also present some challenges for anglers, especially when compared to aquatic insects like mayflies, terrestrial bugs like grasshoppers, and other common forage such as frogs and crayfish.<\/p>\n \nIn This Article<\/h2>\n
What Is the Double Cicada Emergence?<\/h2>\n
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How to Fish the Cicada Emergence 2024<\/h2>\n
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Fishing the Cicada Hatch Isn\u2019t Always as Easy as It Sounds\u00a0<\/h2>\n