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13-Year Cicadas Are Here

CHICAGO (WBBM) -- This is the year of the 13-year cicadas, but don't look for them in the city of Chicago.

As WBBM's Steve Miller reports, you will have to drive about 90 miles south.

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"Drive to Iroquois County, which I actually plan to do."

Doug Taron is curator of biology at the Peggy Notebaart Nature Museum in Chicago, and he says the 13-year cicadas are worth the special trip.

"When you see a good emergence of cicadas, it can be a very dramatic phenomenon. They can be present in really prodigiously large numbers.

"When they come out you will see them crawling up a tree trunk and it will look like the entire trunk of the tree is in motion."

Taron says in Chicago, we will see the annual cicadas, the kind we always see in the heat of the summer, but their numbers pale in comparison to their 13-year relatives.

We do, of course, see 17-year cicadas, but not again until 2024.

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