Cicadas set the stage for a historic event

Hello, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. When Thomas Jefferson was president, there was an event that is finally repeating itself this year -- a concurrent emergence of two specific broods of periodic cicadas; and it won’t happen again until about another two hundred years. The two groups won’t emerge in the same place, but with maybe a million cicadas per acre where it happens that’s probably enough for the most fervid cicada manic; and there are people who get rightly super excited about these fascinating creatures. Cicadas are rich in nutrients and birds, raccoons, foxes and others feast on them. People’s pets eat them, too, and unless they eat too many and get an upset stomach, they are kind of crunchy, there’s no cause for alarm. There’s even a cicada cookbook if you want to immerse yourself into this emergence.