The cicadas are coming. But this year’s brood is only in one part of Georgia

“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.

The 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.”

Although there won’t be as many bugs in Georgia this year, the ones that do appear will make themselves heard.

Evan Lampert, a biology and entomology professor at the University of North Georgia who researches periodical cicadas, said his prior research shows that those in the impacted areas may hear their mating calls at 50 to 80 decibels.

“It’s a very loud sound that they’ll hear basically all day long,” he said.

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.

Those interested in aiding cicada research efforts can help by simply sharing pictures and locations of the insects with Cicada Safari, a tracking site, Lampert said.

“There’s really weird boundaries between some of these broods, and sometimes they emerge at weird times,” he said, making it difficult for researchers to map them.

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.”