Sights and sounds on a sunny day at the Penn-Mar Irish Festival
Penn-Mar Irish Festival at the Markets at Shrewsbury in Shrewsbury Township, Saturday, June 15, 2024.
FOREST PARK, Ill. – Mayumi Barrack sees a pair of periodical cicadas gathering, pulls out her phone, says, “Hi guys!” and takes a photo of them.
“I’m not really a bug person, but the more I see them, the cuter I think they are,” Barrack explained, noting that many other creatures – birds, squirrels, raccoons and more – are just as eager to get close to the bugs, if only to eat them. “I just want to document that they existed.”
And she really has. Barrack has posted over 4,600 photos of the bugs on the Cicada Safari app for cicada lovers. That’s 2,000 more than her nearest competitor. She’s the queen of the cicada hunters, although she doesn’t actually hunt – most of the pictures are from her backyard – and she sees herself as more of a mother to the bugs than a queen.
“I take care of them,” Barrack said, standing in her tree- and flower-filled backyard in a Chicago suburb.
Periodical cicadas are strange, their eccentricities including an extremely heavy urine flow and a zombie fungal infection. But their superfans are also unusual, or at least very passionate.
Gene Kritsky, a professor of biology at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, has been working toward this year’s massive cicada emergence for decades. He first heard about cicadas in 1972 and has been studying and tracking them since 1974. He wrote the book about the current emergence, “A Tale of Two Broods.” He also developed the cicada tracking app, which allows enthusiasts like Barrack to post pictures and find out where the insects are occurring in large numbers.
This is the third time Kritsky has mapped Brood XIII of the cicadas, which is quite an accomplishment considering they only appear every 17 years.
Kritsky often wears a safari hat that makes him look like the Indiana Jones of cicadas, as he is known. He and his wife, artist Jessee Smith, have driven back and forth between Ohio and Illinois several times this spring to enjoy the insects. During several long nights in a forest north of Chicago, he has seen huge numbers of them, including his first blue-eyed cicada, which only occurs once in a million. He called the May 24 appearance “incredible,” as thousands appeared at his location that night.
“Periodic cicadas are the gateway drug to natural history,” Kritsky said.
For New York chef Joseph Yoon, cicadas aren’t just delicious, they’re their dinner. His company Brooklyn Bugs is dedicated to promoting the taste and sustainability of edible insects, even though he knows that many people find the idea repulsive.
Yoon spent nine days in Illinois collecting, freezing and packaging tens of thousands of cicadas. After returning home, he served tempura cicadas to 400 people at a Syracuse University event.
Yoon said collecting and cooking cicadas “is quite painful for me because I love the cicadas so much.”
But he added: “At the same time, I can also recognize and appreciate that the life of each of these cicadas has the potential to change someone’s perception or opinion about eating insects.”
Yoon’s friend, Wisconsin artist and professor Jennifer Angus, also sees the beauty in cicadas and other insects – so much so that she incorporates the real bugs into her art, sometimes putting costumes on them and having them pose like dolls.
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“I love them because they just have great faces and bulging eyes and they’re very robust,” Angus said. “They can withstand the stress of my shows.”
“I find their faces funny,” said Angus.
Renee Martin teaches interior design at the University of Kentucky and is also a puppeteer. For a puppet festival in Cincinnati three years ago—when Brood X was making big news on the East Coast—someone suggested she design a cicada costume or puppet.
“What should I do? A cicada striptease?” she asked her friends and they answered with a clear yes.
She designed “something between a doll and a costume” for that festival and then brought it out again for her big performance this year, when she put on a show for friends, neighbors and journalists in a Cincinnati back alley.
Martin, wearing fake fishnet stockings and moving comically to stripper music, begins as a pale cardboard nymph and then bursts out as a grown-up, red-eyed nymph. The audience added to the effect with noisemakers and shouts of “Ooh la la” and “sexy cicada.”
Meanwhile, Kritsky’s app is teeming with photos of cicadas posted by nearly 5,000 people. About 150 people have posted at least 100 pictures of cicadas, but none come close to Barrack – who said she was surprised to be in the lead.
“I have so many pictures that I haven’t sent yet,” she said.
