Song of the Cicada When Ann McIntosh and I made plans for me to visit and fish with her at her newly acquired cottage along the Colerain Club water on Spruce Creek, we did not give a thought to what insect hatches would be happening at the time. The third week of June was simply the first time that was mutually convenient. Yet a natural phenomenon unforeseen by both of us set the stage for three days of the most remarkable trout fishing I’ve ever experienced. That phenomenon was the emergence of Brood XIV of the periodical cicada, also known as the 17-year “locust.” This is a complete misnomer, however. Cicadas bear no relation to locusts, which are large grasshoppers. Everyone has heard the common Annual or Dog Day Cicada. This is the insect that sings so loudly on hot, late-summer days. Few people have seen this insect, however, or recognized it if they did see one. Dog Day Cicadas spend most of their time in trees, but sometimes find their way onto streets and sidewalks. They are a large, robust, primitive-looking insect approximately an inch and three-quarters to nearly two inches in total length. They are predominantly black, with some olive green patterning on the wings and back. Cicadas are harmless to humans and don’t bite, but they are definitely scary looking and will buzz and vibrate if picked up. Periodical cicadas are similar in shape to the Dog Day Cicada. Their size is somewhat variable, and from what I’ve seen they can be either slightly larger or smaller than the Dog Day Cicadas. Periodical cicadas are black and orange rather than black and olive. They also have prominent bright-red eyes. They emerge much earlier in the year, typically beginning in early June and mostly gone by early July, once they have finished mating and egg laying. There are 13-year cicadas in the South, but in Pennsylvania we have only the 17-year variety. Their life history is rather complicated. There is plenty of excellent information available on periodical cicadas on the Internet, including on the Penn State University website. A chart is available there which shows in what Pennsylvania counties each brood is expected to hatch in what years. It’s important to note, however, that the cicadas are not present uniformly throughout a given county. They can be locally very abundant or completely absent. When I spoke to Ann as the date for our visit approached and asked what was hatching, she had a one-word answer: cicadas. I had some patterns I had tied up for the emergence of Brood X, which was present throughout many counties in Southeastern Pennsylvania in 2004. But I never got to fish over them that year. A friend of mine, Pat Appignani, told me he was going on a trip to Penn’s Creek a week or two prior to my trip and that he would give me a report. He came back with a preserved specimen, and the flies I had tied in 2004 were an excellent match for size and color. I also brought along some of the cicada pattern we were stocking at The Sporting Gentleman, the Hoov’s Cicada, even though it seemed way too small. As it turned out, however, these flies were the correct size for the cicadas we saw on Spruce Creek and the Little Juniata. Donna Trexler and I arrived at Ann’s cottage on Sunday afternoon, June 22 and departed on Wednesday afternoon, June 25 right after lunch. Except for a very short bit of nymph fishing on Tuesday morning we fished cicada patterns the entire time. Imagine fishing a foam terrestrial pattern tied on a size 8 2X Long hook, on a 3X tippet, and catching trout ranging in size from 12 to 24 inches with an average size about 16 inches. And this was not just on the private water on Spruce Creek, but also on the public water on the Little Juniata. That’s what it’s like to fish over a cicada hatch. The trees and shrubs were full of cicadas. In some places you could pick them like berries. Their song began as soon as the sun was on the trees and continued all day long. It would swell in volume then fade then swell again, a breaking wave of sound. You could see them flying around the trees, and out over the stream. Some of the ones that flew out over the water seemed to run out of steam and fluttered down to land on the surface. They rarely drifted far before disappearing into a riseform. These big, meaty morsels brought the largest trout in the stream to the surface to feed. Some of the rises created a deep “schlug” reminiscent of a flushing toilet—not a sound made by a small fish. I’ve caught my share of big trout over the years on streamers and nymph patterns, but never before have I caught so many on floating flies. It wasn’t beautiful, delicate, classical dry fly fishing but rather more like bass bugging for trout. Even so, much as I hate to resort to a descriptor that has been overused to the point of becoming cliché, it really was awesome! I have permanently burned into my memory the image of a two-foot-plus-long brown trout looming up, sticking his snout out of the water and closing on my fly. It will be years before the periodical cicadas return to the Spruce Creek area, and who knows whether or not I will get to fish them there again? However, they are expected again in southeastern Pennsylvania in 2012. Now that I know first-hand the kind of fishing they can create, you can be sure that I will make a serious effort to meet this “hatch.” They are unlikely to produce much in the way of trout fishing here, since by the time they emerge most of our Southeastern Pennsylvania streams are too low and warm. But there is excellent potential for spectacular smallmouth bass fishing if the cicadas appear along streams like the Brandywine and the Perkiomen. It should be a simple matter of driving to various access points on sunny days in June and listening for the song of the cicada. There should also be plenty of reports circulating around the Internet on various fly fishing websites and forums. For the smallmouth, I suspect that a size 6 or 8 black popper or hair bug would work perfectly fine. But I will probably use the same foam cicada pattern that I modified from Greg Hoover’s cicada pattern, the Hoov’s Cicada. I will be glad to e-mail the pattern and tying directions on request.
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