Ep 144: Fishing the Cicada Hatch, with Dave Zielinski
Dave Zielinski loves following the cicada hatches around the eastern U.S. and is the author of Cicada Madness, which covers all things pertaining to fly fishing during these exciting emergences. In this episode, we cover the life histories of cicadas, the differences between annual and periodical cicadas, how to plan a fishing trip to coincide with the emergence, how to actually find the bugs once they’re out, and how to fish effectively during the hatch.
Cicada Madness book: link
Instagram: @down_home_boatworks
Website: www.downhomeboatworks.com
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Katie
You’re listening to the Fish Untamed Podcast, your home for fly fishing the backcountry. This is episode 144 with Dave Zielinski on fishing the cicada hatch. Well, okay, I start every episode by getting a background on my guests and how they got into the outdoors. I'd love to hear how you got into fly fishing specifically and also hunting and the outdoors in general. How'd you get started?
Dave
Yeah, I come from a family of outdoors people. So I mean, from my earliest memories are being outside with my dad fishing particularly and then later on hunting. So at an early age, seriously, my earliest memories, when I think back as far as I can think, it's fishing. So, uh, always been fishing and then fly fishing was a kind of an odd one for me because my, my dad didn't fly fish and I didn't know, we didn't know anybody that actually fly fished. And I'm not even sure that I've seen too many people fly fishing at an early age. Uh, but some, somewhere when I was maybe around, I don't know, between 10 and 13 years old or something like that. Um, my dad took me to one of those big sportsman shows and I saw fly casting and like the, the, the like demo ponds and stuff, and I was like, I want to do that. And my dad had bought me a, uh, a fly rod kit at that shows a fiberglass fly rod with a foam handle. It's a South bend, um, metal ferrules, the whole thing with a little reel and everything. And then at that same show, I didn't know it at the time, but knew it later that Barry and Kathy Beck, the kind of famous photographer, fly fisher folk from Pennsylvania, were there and Kathy Beck actually gave me a little box of flies. So I didn't know that at the time, but I knew that like later on, as I started like in my teen years and looking at magazines and things like that, and I was like, wait a minute, I knew who that is. And so that was pretty cool. And that was how I got my start. And learned from books, learned from- there was no internet back then. That was sometime probably in the early '80s. And I just learned from books my dad would bring home. He knew I was crazy about it. So he would buy books or whatever and bring used books home. And I'd learn from that way. And then I'd go out in the yard and cast my fly rod out there, not knowing that I was just totally destroying my fly line and everything on the grass and all that. But yeah, and then I started taking it fishing and we had access to farm ponds and then we actually had access to a Great Lakes steelhead. And actually my first trout was a Great Lakes steelhead on a fly line.
Katie
Oh wow.
Dave
Yeah, so kind of strange to think back that and it kind of comes full circle.
Katie
Two things I always wonder when people get started without some sort of mentor taking them. When you're seeing somebody cast on that pond, did you understand how that translates to getting a fish on your line? Because I remember thinking that as a kid. I saw someone doing it and I was like, no way the fish are going to fall for that with that big thick line. In my mind, it was you tie that thick line through the eye of a hook. And I was like, those people are silly. You need a clear line. Did you understand what they were doing or what you were seeing? Were you just intrigued by the casting motion or did you understand the concept of why a fly line and why they were doing what they were doing?
Dave
No, not from a technical understanding, but I read the book and I remember the book and I have it here somewhere. It was Larry Solomon, Modern Fly Fishing. It was end to end from beginning to tarpon. It was everything. It was black and white paper bound. And it was almost like newspaper type of print. And I read that thing and I kind of put it together that there was, you know, fly line and this thing called backing and then leader and all this stuff. But I had no idea, like the specifics of like a leader design and tapered leader, anything like that. But I do remember going to a place. So we lived, part of my time as a kid outside at Eerie PA, We lived in a little town called Waterford, which you might be familiar with, right? And dirt roads, everything. And I could walk kind of anywhere. And we had this big, we had this big swamp near us that had like a little outflow and stuff. And I would walk there and it was probably a mile away. And I remember going there and there was a guy with a fly rod and he was doing the casting thing. He's literally probably the first person I ever saw fly casting in the flesh, you know? And I started talking to him. I was probably 14, 15 at the time. I remember being so disappointed because he was using a fly rod, but he had a hook and worms on the end. I was like, "Wait a minute. That's not what it's supposed to be in my book." I went home and I was like, "What the heck? I guess nobody does fly fish. They just put this thing on there. They use regular hooks and worms." He was catching panfish and stuff. Yeah, it was strange, but no, I don't think so. I think you're right. I probably felt it the same way, like what the heck, this thick green line. Then okay, well, there's this thin leader. I had a kit, came in a kit, and I wore that thing out. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know that I really understood it until maybe a lot later, when I actually did start to dive into it as a teenager, and then really start to learn. And then you saw some things on TV periodically or here and there, and then really started to understand it and kind of learning by trial and error a lot. No friends that did it, nothing.
Katie
What was that guy's experience like casting with a worm? Like was the cast working? I'm just picturing it having a big heavy worm on the end of a flyer that was probably set up for a tiny dry fly or something like that. It doesn't seem like it would work very well.
Dave
It was probably like a, it was like a lob. I remember he was across the thing for me, and it wasn't very far, it was 20 yards or something, but he was across the thing, and I was like, "Fly rod, clearly." And he was, but it was more of the lob, and it wasn't this graceful thing.
Katie
The other question I always like to ask people who didn't grow up with a mentor, like someone who especially learned from books, not YouTube and all the stuff that's out there these days, how did you know whether you were doing it right or not? I'm sure some of it's with time, but with YouTube, you can compare the way you look to the way that person looks, but in a book, you're just using pictures. Like how do you learn and kind of track your progress with that?
Dave
It's a funny thing. Like I think about this too, 'cause I've been on this journey for a long time and I don't really know, but I can only describe it like the feel of it. Like you know when you do something right. And I can liken that to music or playing music. I play instruments, I play guitars and things like that. And there's a feel element to it. And I think like you somehow know you're doing it right because it feels right. And I thought of that, I think of this a lot because in my present day, Like I am, I've thrown myself at spade casting and spade fishing. And I have a friend that does it pretty well, but his, his journey started only a little bit earlier than me with it. And you know, you're right. We do have YouTube and you can look and all this stuff and watch and see how it looks and watch yourself. But I'll tell you like with spade rod, when it, when it feels good and you're like, ah, and it's flying a laser out there, you're like, mm-hmm, that's right. I got it. Do that again.
Katie
No, I don't mean there's a feel to loading the rod right. And if you don't do it, you can tell that something went wrong. So I guess I can understand that feeling. I just wasn't sure how that translated from a book. If it took longer or anything to get to that point where you're like, "Okay, I know I've got it now."
Dave
You know, I think so. I think you don't... Because you're right. If it doesn't feel right or whether it falls apart and it doesn't... You don't make the distance sometimes, right? And I can remember, I still fish some of the waters that I grew up on. And I remember being a younger guy and struggling with it or learning it or whatever and thinking I was doing adequate. But I can go to some spots that haven't changed and I can go there and go like, "Man, I remember there was trout rising in front of that rock over there and I could never reach them." And today, It's like one back cast and a double haul, and I'm touching the other bank. And it's like, oh, yeah.
Katie
I've gotten better. Come a long way. Yeah, I think the first person I ever saw fly fishing was actually on French Creek, which I know you mentioned that you are familiar with. So I also remember that I was boating along and saw somebody. I was like, what are they doing? I had no idea what it was. I mean, I knew it was fly fishing, but that's the most I could tell you. But it was fun to hear that you and I have that river in common.
Dave
Did you-- did that-- was that like a moment for you that you wanted to do?
Katie
No
Dave
It wasn't? It came way later?
Katie
Yeah.
Dave
Oh, that's great.
Katie
Yeah, no, I spin fished a lot. But fly fishing was not a thing for me until I was in college. So-
Dave
Oh, cool. Well, yeah, well, French Creek and I go way back to some of those early childhood memories.
Katie
Really? Oh, yeah?
Dave
Oh, yeah.
Katie
Where at on the river?
Dave
A lot around Cambridge Springs.
Katie
OK.
Dave
Yeah, Cambridge Springs down to Saegertown all over the place up even up in the New York state.
Katie
Okay, I've never been up that far.
Dave
Yeah, it's a really long running, it's a special river. It's a lot of history there and a lot of it's kind of untouched still and pretty crazy.
Katie
Yeah, I always heard that it was the most biodiverse stream east of the Mississippi. I don't know if that's true or not, but in my experience, it seemed true. I mean, I've caught so many different things out of that river and all the mussels and crustaceans and everything. There's just a lot going on.
Dave
It is. And there isn't much surface mining up there, so the landscape hasn't really been changed. So it's pretty cool. Some of it's creepy and scares the heck out of me, right? So you can't see into the water. And it's like, we musky fish there. And it's like, God, I hope I don't fall out of this thing because I'll walk on water to get out of here.
Katie
I've seen some big fish in some of those deeper holes that just kind of slink down into nothingness. You know, right next to water that's three feet deep and crystal clear, but then you've just got those murky holes on the bends that, yeah, I've said many times that you wouldn't pay me money to get in that water. Oh, I'd swim in there. No way. And then
Dave
the huge log jams, and it just has a vibe to it. And a lot of those creeks do. Even its tributaries and stuff. has to do with the geology and the landscape and everything. But yeah, it's a special place. I just actually was up there, drove over a piece of it just earlier this week, and just was like- slowed down a little bit and took a look up, and it was like, man, the old French Creek.
Katie
We still hit it every year when we come home to visit family and stuff. It's something I look forward to every year. So I'm happy to hear that somebody else is still out there enjoying it.
Dave
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Since the muskie bug, people really caught into the whole toothy critter thing. And the product within the last decade, there's always been guys that have fished it. You run into old timers all the time and, "Oh, I've been fishing here since the '70s or whatever." And there's always been musky in that place and stuff. And fly fishermen are relatively new to that stuff. And it gets fished a lot. You'll pull up and you'll see, "Oh, there's a drift boat trailer here. I wonder who that is. You talk to, you run into people and they're like, "Hey, come down here from Pittsburgh or you know, Ohio or whatever to fish in and stuff." So, yeah.
Katie
Well, we can change gears here to the kind of the main topic, I guess, which is cicadas, because it sounds like you're kind of the cicada guy. So, I will pick your brain here.
Dave
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Katie
You've released a book. Is it a recent release? Yeah,
Dave
so it came out in October of 2023. It is called Cicada Madness. It's on Stackpole Books. I wrote this kind of, it's a funny story, kind of how it came to be. I never really intended or set out to write a book or anything, but several few decades ago in the 90s, my kind of main fishing friends and I really stumbled across cicadas, periodical cicadas first and fish them and then started to dig around and say, "Oh, wow, we could do this next year or the year after if we drive somewhere and figure it out and find it and whatever." Because when you experience it, it's, you know, I say it's my definition of epic. When I hear, you know, fishing was epic, immediately I'm thinking of screaming cicadas and, you know, several hundred fish. I mean, it is pretty crazy when it's on. So we started to, my friends and I, I always say we because what goes into this book was a lot of collaboration of friends and other cicada crazy folks that I've found along the way. But we started chasing it around and then we got pretty good at figuring it out and predicting it and using our modern resources, our technology, our Google Earth, our internet and everything else, and all that kind of evolution to figuring out like, hey, next year's a year, and we're gonna go here, here, and here, and hit these lakes, rivers, whatever, and figure out the timing when things were gonna emerge, and when the fish are gonna be on the bugs. And someone said like, ah, you should write a book, and someone else said it, and then someone else said it, and I was like, you know what? I started looking at it and said, I started this book before Brood X, which would have been 2021. And I can, I'll explain to you what all that stuff is. But I looked at it and I was like, 2020, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024, 2025, we have cicadas every year, piratical cicadas somewhere every year in those years. And I was like, I did a little internet search. I was like, did anyone ever write a fishing book on this? no. I was like, hmm. I was talking to a friend and I went to Stackpole Books. I looked at my phishing book library and I was like, every book says Stackpole Books on it. I was like, well, they seem to be the ones. And I said, if they'll do the book, I'll write the book. So, I went to their website. And on every publisher's website, there's submission guidelines. So, I went to submission guidelines. I said, okay, well, got to write a sample chapter, table of contents, kind of a synopsis, this and that, why you're credible, why you're qualified, and all this stuff. So I did it, took like two days, whipped it out, gave it to a friend of mine who, like, he wrote for Pittsburgh Post-Gazette back in the '80s, '90s. He reviewed it and was like, "Ah, it's pretty good. You're not bad," and corrected all my mistakes. And then I emailed it off and I got an automated email back and it was like, "We get a lot of submissions. You will hear from us, but it's probably going to be six or eight months." Five, six days later I get an email from Jay Nichols, the editor for the phishing section of StackPool and was like, "Been waiting for somebody to do this. Let's talk." And then by a week later I had a contract and I was like, "I guess I'm writing a book." So that's how we got into it.
Katie
And how long did that take?
Dave
So it was, you know, it was those COVID times we all lived through, right? So it was, you know, you kind of had a lot of time. I'd say it took me, well, it's funny. I'll tell people it's taken 30 years to write the book, but literally when I sat down and put pen to paper, you know, keys to keyboards or whatever you want to say, it was probably 10 months.
Katie
Okay. - Yeah. So yeah, walk me through what the different brood names are, because that's something I hear, but I don't, I assume that's like a, you know, the cicadas are on a cycle and that's like that cycle's label has been my best guess, but I don't know for sure. That's just my guess. So is that correct? You're spot
Dave
on and your science teachers are going to be proud of you if they ever listen to this. So it is, so yeah, so there's, so starting reeling it back, there's two distinct kind of types of cicadas. They all kind of look the same. Colorations are a bit different. They range in size from kind of small to pretty big, but they're all in one big family of about 3,000, 3,500 bugs all around the world. A lot of, almost everywhere in the world has cicadas. The annual cicadas and periodical cicadas are what you're gonna hear a difference of. So an annual variety of cicada, they emerge every year, okay? So the cicadas that inhabit the area that you live, they will happen every year in varying numbers. So some years you're gonna see a whole lot of them, and some years you're gonna have a few of them, but they're always going to be present. And where you are in Colorado, in the front range, there's several species of annual cicadas, very fishable too, in like June, just around runoff time. But they happen every year. So think of like, if you've ever experienced like really epic grasshopper fishing. So some years there's like, oh, there's a grasshopper plague and all the farmers are worried about their crops. And then that doesn't happen for nine or 10 more years. And you have grasshoppers every year, but you don't have these like huge prolific emergences of them. Varies between environmental conditions. A lot is misunderstood or not understood about annual cicadas of their life cycle. How long do the nymphs live underground before they're triggered to emerge? There's some species of cicadas are really not well understood. A lot of science says it's dictated by how much rainfall we get cumulative over three or four years. And that attributes to tree growth and things like that. And there's all kinds of different theories. a lot of mystery that goes around these cicadas. Switch to periodical cicadas, which is quite different and very, very unique. Only in the United States from about the Mississippi eastward did this species of cicada called Magis cicada exist. And this species of cicadas has seven different subspecies, and they are distinct because of their life cycle length. There are 13 year and there are 17 year cyclical cicadas. For periodical cicadas, all of the members of that cycle will emerge in the year of emergence. There won't be varying degrees of last year, this year, next year. It's all happening. Everybody's coming out to party when it's their turn. These are classified by broods, signified by Roman numerals. There are 15, 17 year broods, and there are, there are, I'm sorry, there's 12 17 year broods, and five 13-year broods. And 13-year cycles and 17-year cycles is basically the division of some of where these bugs live and what years they're going to occur. Last year, or I'm sorry, this year, 2024, as we're talking this last spring, we actually had a co-emergence, which was something that really rarely occurs. If you take 13 times 17, the life cycle lengths, it's 221 years. These two broods that happened in May, June of this year will not happen again for 221 years. They won't occur again together. Craziness.
Katie
So, help me understand, the ones that are every 17 years, are these happening on the same 17 year cycle these staggered so like most years something will be emerging. This year would be the ones that came out 17 years ago, but maybe next year another one will come out that came out 17 years before that.
Dave
Yes.
Katie
Is it that many years something will be emerging? It's just which brood it is. Yeah.
Dave
That's what I said earlier is my friends and I stumbled across it. Then it was like, started learning about it and saying like, wow, we can if we drive to if we drive to the Midwest next year, we can do this again. And then we'd be driving to the south the following year. We do this again. So, yeah, so there are so it is exactly as you described. So this coming spring, for instance, is brood XIV. It's a 17 year periodical cicada. This will be happening in May, June of our spring. We have them in Pennsylvania. We'll have them in Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, couple other states and sprinkled in between there. Ohio, Southern Ohio has some. And those last occurred in 2008.
Katie
Okay, okay.
Dave
The ones that we just had in 2024, so brood XIII, is it also a 17 year cicada, it last emerged in 2007. So that brood actually occurred in the Midwest and the South. So big emergence there. So yeah, so if the broods 17 years apart for 17 years and 13 years apart, the next time will come will be another 13 years. So this one that we have in 2025, brood XIV, this will be the third time that I encountered this one.
Katie
Okay.
Dave
So it's pretty cool. And you get a whole lot older in between.
Katie
Are the broods then kind of separated geographically then? So you could fish a cicada hatch like most years, but you might have to travel around to where each of those is happening. And that's tied to that brood. Like, you know, this brood will always come out in the same rough geographical area.
Dave
Yeah, you're spot on. So, absolutely. So, common misconceptions about broods is they, because someone had great cicada emergence in fishing last year, and they heard that there's cicadas this year, they're not gonna be in the same place. So, what science tells us is, four million years ago, three and a half million years ago, there was one group of cicadas that occupied a huge landmass. And then for whatever reason, environmental events, fire, landslides, geographic shifts, plate tectonic shifts, all these things, the glaciers that created the Great Lakes moved all this land. So if you think of cicadas that were buried for a long time, for 17 years, 13 years, they got moved around and they like wake up in a new place. So they become their own, they interbreed with themselves, they become their own thing over here and then here and here. So what we have are, they don't overlap. So these periodical broods don't overlap, but they actually fit together like puzzle pieces. So there's adjacencies. And an interesting topic of this adjacency, there's two, was this last year where we had a 13 and a 17 year co-emerging. The closest they got together was somewhere around Springfield, Illinois. but it wasn't very close. It was separated by miles. And scientists were all over that to see like, is there gonna be like intermingling or something? And they do DNA and all this stuff. So that research will come out in time. The other one is in Central Pennsylvania is this brood XIV, which is coming up here in May and June. And then in 2021, we had brood X, which was like literally over the mountain. So there was a lot of confusion among fly fishers thinking like, oh, in 2021, there was like, oh, those bugs are gonna be all over the place. There was fly shops promoting it and everything. And I'm sitting here going, no, it's not gonna be there. It's gonna be somewhere else. It's gonna be really good, but it's not gonna be where you guys think. And it's confusion with those birds are so close, but they're separated by several years. They won't, they don't occur in the same place. So literally when you encounter these things, you can encounter the boundary. You'll be driving down a road and you'll hear screaming on that hillside and you'll hear nothing over there.
Katie
Oh, weird.
Dave
Or yeah, or you'll just drive out of it and like no more bugs, they're done. They're back there.
Katie
Okay, I have a whole bunch of questions on this. (laughing) Why was Brood X such a big deal? Because I heard so much about Brute X the year that that happened that I was under the impression that cicadas only come out every 17 years. That was a big deal because it had been so long since it had happened. And then I found out that it's happening not that uncommonly. And so why was Brute X such a big topic? But I don't hear about it- I didn't hear about it this year.
Dave
Did you hear anything this year, though, where you are? Because we had this co-emergence thing. Oh, yeah. I did hear a little bit about the-
Katie
I did hear a little bit about the co-emergence, But not as much as I heard about Brood X. It seemed like a smaller deal online.
Dave
Yeah. So Brood X is known as the Great Eastern Brood. So its distribution is gigantic. So that's probably why you heard all the hype. It was like 20 states that got Brood X cicadas. So it's such a huge prolific distribution, kind of in the South and Middle, I guess you'd called Southeast and Coastal Plain. Such a huge presence of it that you get all the news stations on it. So then it's totally hyped up. So yeah, the Great Eastern Brood, Brood X.
Katie
Second, are there theories as to why they're on these cyclical patterns? What's the benefit to the cicada to come out every 17 years?
Dave
Yeah, lots of theories. Some of them are argued, some of them are disproved. I go through a a whole bunch of this in my book based on kind of talking to scientists and things like that. There was one, so one of the theories, which is plausible, but, um, scientists are like kind of always kind of disproving it is predator satiation. So if you think of predator prey cycles, uh, if you had, uh, a huge bump in, predators at the same time you had big bumps and what they prey on you could they could be all depleted and with 17-year cycles it it's not a rely it's a bumper crop when it occurs but they there's so many that they can't get them all so predator satiation is is animals that will eat cicadas they're so they're safe, there's, you know, the numbers of bugs ensure the survival of the species. And that that cyclical nature also ensures the survival of the species. Now, that gets disproven based on growth cycles. So they believe these things have evolved over millions of years. And it's a slow, they're among the slowest growing bugs there is or like living things that we have. They have a super long life cycle to maturity. They need to go through five nymphal stages underground. So these, first off, these things live underground. They don't live in water. So they're born in the ground from eggs and they burrow in the ground and they only eat on the roots of trees and plants. So some of the thoughts are to protect the species from environmental things, forest fires, all these things, they've learned, they've evolved and slowed their growth cycle so that they're less affected by what happens above them. And they just basically suck around on roots and grow very slowly, molt into the kind of the next size until they get their fifth in star. And then there's this trigger to emerge. And that trigger to emerge is all synchronized with all their brothers and sisters and relatives underground at that same time.
Katie
My last kind of scientific question is why the periodic ones are all in the east? If we've got other annual ones out here, is there a reason that they're all kind of stuck on the eastern side of the country?
Dave
That is the question, right? So that-- and it could be. So just like you have cicadas out there, and we have cicadas everywhere else is- So we do know that 3.9 million years ago, there was a parent species and it was here, just like you have species out there that we don't have back east here. And some events occurred that triggered this thing to have a longer life cycle. So there's this term called proto-periodicity. So it is a varying life cycle. Most of our other annual cicadas are proto-periodic. So they have this variable life cycle. Sometimes it takes four years, five years, seven years. We don't know. But this one particular species locked into a longer life cycle and that's it. And then it got distributed. And then we've seen divergence. So the DNA shows that there was a parent species 3.9 million years ago, and then there was a fork in the road. And that fork in the road created another subgroup and another subgroup over here. And that's how we have these differences in the subspecies of managed cicada and the varying lifecycle, 13 or 17.
Katie
It's so weird. It's so different from everything else. I couldn't name anything else that has such a long lifecycle, especially for an insect. Think of insects as they're born, they mate, they die, like sometimes all in the same day. and then you've got these things that are living 17, like longer than a dog. That's just crazy. Yeah. Yeah.
Dave
I mean, you could have a kid and then the kid's got a driver's license. And the next time they're around, that's happened to me. It is. But I think nature's crazy, right? So this is such a weird thing. All the questions you ask, we sit there and just go, what the heck? Yeah, why just in the East? And why kind of just contained by the United States?
Katie
Yeah, like why are they honoring political boundaries? It doesn't even cross borders. Yeah.
Dave
So really cool and we're really lucky, but the key there with periodicals, it's predictable, you know it's gonna happen. Like I made my plans for May and June already, 'cause I know it's gonna happen and I know where it's gonna happen and I can tell you about when it's gonna happen. And we booked Airbnb's and we're ready to go. So it's like, that's what's cool about it is it's a predictable, synchronized emergence. I can guarantee you one thing. You go, there are going to be millions of bugs.
Katie
That's a good transition into the fishing side of this, because this has all been super interesting. But there's going to be people who are like, OK, now tell me how to apply this this information. So I'll let you kind of take the lead here on on the fishing tactics and stuff. One specific thing I want to know is, when you're trying to target cicadas, are you using specific cicada flies? Or could you reasonably go out with any hopper? Could you be fishing for what you think is hopper season, and you're actually catching fish that think they're eating cicadas? Does that happen? Or are they pretty specific from the hoppers?
Dave
Yeah, you've already become a Colorado angler, right? You could use an attractor and probably catch them all, right? It doesn't really matter. If you're yeah. Um, no, we, we, you know, we love to match the hatch as fly fisher people. Right. Um, my, my book has 59 fly patterns in it. So, um, why 59? I don't know. There's so many different techniques and styles. It was kind of cool to collect them all. Um, but really, uh, you gotta get, look, it's like anything, get the size, right. Get the profile, right. Um, I don't know that color, all that matters, but these cicadas are black and orange.
Katie
Okay.
Dave
So a bunch of black foam, some orange highlights, orange rubber legs, and you're fishing. And you'll see in my book, and I'll send you a copy here, I got your address. I sometimes use cork bass poppers that are kind of suggestive of a cicada profile, and those work awesome. Okay. So yeah, you can get as accurate as you want, but you can keep it simple too and catch just as many fish.
Katie
Okay, so here's where I let you take it away and I'm going to set the stage for you here is let's pretend that you are getting ready for next year. Let's not even pretend. You're getting ready for next year's cicada hatch. From the moment you find out when this is happening, what are the steps you're going to take? That'll culminate in the gear you're taking and everything, so we'll kind of cover everything. But the first step is finding out where and when the cicadas are going to be out. So let's start with that and then we'll move closer and closer to when you're actually fishing and that'll kind of end with where you're going, what you're using and things like that.
Dave
Yeah, absolutely. So like I said, if we just talk specifically 2025 coming up, we have brood XIV, as I mentioned. This is a 17-year periodical cicada. The places it will occur, it's around central Pennsylvania. And then there's a, there's another band that goes to Northern Georgia, Tennessee, like middle North, Tennessee, a lot of Kentucky, a lot of Southern Ohio, and some of Indiana. And that would be like a good kind of place to start. Now, I have a map of where the broods occur. You can also find a map of, you know, the emergencies online. I just posted some on my Instagram to kind of hype it up. And so you start there and then you say, when? And you say, well, the one thing I didn't talk about on the life cycle of the bugs is what triggers the emergence and that is key to when you're gonna go. And some of this is, the fun in this is figuring it out the adventure and the bit of the scouting and everything else. And that's the stuff that really gets me going. So what triggers the emergence is a ground soil temperature about eight inches deep of sixty four, sixty eight degrees. So if you think of spring and in the places that I just mentioned, the states I mentioned, that's going to be May, June. So summer solstice is June 20th, June 21st. That's our longest day of the year. So what's happening as we approach that? We're getting more and more sun as we approach the summer solstice. More sun that hits the ground, we're going to retain more heat in the ground, and we're going to start to raise that temperature. Now you literally could, and scientists do, and they do this every year, there's a Cicada Emergencies, go and stick some thermometers in the ground, just your grill thermometers, and start looking at ground temperature. going to happen the more south you are it's going to happen middle of May to end of May, give or take. And as you get northern more like where I the northern ish, northern ish in this year is going to be around central Pennsylvania. It's going to happen towards June. So that first week of June bugs are going to be popping out of the ground. So they will emerge out of the ground when that soil temperature hits that sweet spot. And then they're going to and crawl up fences, telephone poles, whatever's nearby. And whatever hasn't changed in the last 17 years, hopefully there's not a parking lot on top of them because that would be a problem. And that's what happens. And they're gonna crawl and then they're going to morph and they morph into their final form. So if you've ever seen like a stone fly crawl out on a rock and it splits its casing in the back and then it pulls itself out and the wings unroll and it looks all freaky and, you know, kind of weird, and then it dries out and it turns into the bug. And that's what happens to these cicadas. So it usually happens at night. And then by morning, you're gonna look at trees and be like, holy cow, there's piles of bugs. That's some of the scouting. So whenever you can, if you know the area you wanna fish, so this is what I do. So I understand where it's gonna occur about. And then I go to like Google Earth and I overlay Google Earth with the cicada map. And I look, well, there's a pretty nice lake or a pretty cool river. And I look for like these big areas of trees say, well, they need forests. The cicada feeds on the roots of trees and they need trees to do their thing. And they actually need trees to lay their eggs. So I need big forests and I need, I want it to be near water. And you're kind of playing a game of hope right there, right? Like, well, the brood map says they're near here. There's this great looking reservoir or river, and there's a bunch of trees. So you're sitting on this hope plan right now. Like, I hope it happens. So what you do is you try to go, if you can, if you're local or nearby, or you have friends nearby, a local, take a drive. And you go in that middle May, if you're in the South, and you're gonna drive to some of these places. If I'm in Pennsylvania, I go like the Memorial Day weekends like I'll go or that very first verge of June, 1st of June, 3rd of June, go take a drive and just be really not fishing at this point. You're going to look for bugs. And I always tell the story, I tell the story in my book that I do the scouting and you look kind of funny, you walk, you park your car and you walk around, you're looking up trees, looking around, looking at the ground. I had a game warden walk up, like come drive by me and was like, "Can I help you? You lost? You looking for something?" And I was like, "Ah, I'm looking for bugs." And they just went, "You're looking for cicadas. Oh my God. North end, north end of the lake. That's where you want to go. There's ton billions of them." And I'm like, "Thank you." So talk to people. So so So you do a little bit of that scouting, looking for bugs. Now, the bugs themselves, they don't just crawl to the ground, turn into a winged insect, and then fly around and fall in the water. What happens is these bugs are at the end of their life. So what happens when they first start emerging, you see a few here and there, and then you get to this critical mass. You literally could go one day and see 10 bugs, and the very next day there's a thousand bugs, 10,000 bugs. It builds up into this big graph, right? And when there's critical mass of bugs on the ground, above the ground is when the mating starts. The males are the only ones that sing. So the singing you hear all the males attracting mates. And when they sing is when they start to fly. So they sit in a branch, start singing, females fly over to them. More males come and you pretty soon have this, you know, a grove of trees is just screaming. And if you're lucky, those trees are over water or near water, and they're gonna cross and they're gonna cross a lake. They're gonna cross a river. They're gonna cross, you know, cicada won't fly miles, but it'll fly a hundred yards to get to that tree where they hear all the going on. And what happens is one bug hits the water. Well, one bug doesn't make your fishing. but if you think of 1% of a million bugs fall in the water, that's a lot of bugs in the water. If you think of a spinner fall, with our mayflies, right? They're all eventually gonna fall, but there's a million bugs up there in this big cloud. And that's what makes the fish in is when you get enough bugs on the water and the fish know like, oh, there's food there. They start looking around and with cicadas, they start hunting them. So I'll rewind and like back to your question of, here's the plan. So I kind of said like, you got to scout a little bit, you got to do a little homework, which is fun, fun stuff. And then you go and scout if you can, or you just go on a hunch, but you don't want to go the first day the bugs are out. You got to wait about eight or 10 days from that like mass emergence. And that's going to take a little while. So if I were to say, if I were to be in the South, like if I were going to go Tennessee, Kentucky, something like that, I'm going to start poking around middle of May. And then I'm going to say like the last week in May, I bet we're fishing. I bet 10 days from when we started seeing bugs, we're going to have flying, singing, and enough bugs hit the water, wind blows them around, they're pretty clumsy, then you're going to have fishing.
Katie
Let's pretend this is a bell curve. You know, the first bug emerges at the beginning of the bell curve, and then you have the big mass of them. what's the length of time between the first bug out and the last bug to die, and how far into that bell curve is when the fish kind of switch gears, like just for a timeline here?
Dave
I would tell you, from the first bug you see, if you only had limited time or whatever, you said two weeks from the first bug, you're fishing.
Katie
Okay.
Dave
And these bugs will live, depending on the weather, up to six weeks, 'til they're all gone.
Katie
And it's the rest of that bell curve, good fishing, even as it starts to die down because the fish have changed their patterns. Even if they start to decrease in numbers, I assume the fish, now that they're kind of keyed into that, will still linger a little bit longer than it took them to ramp up on the front end of the bell curve?
Dave
I tell everybody you'd rather be late than early. All the data that I have from fishing several periodical broods, we fish well beyond the singing stopped and the bugs are gone. fish remember, you're going to see fish. They remind us of ourselves. You'll see carp cruising around, moping around, looking for a bug that isn't there anymore. They were just feeding on them for weeks on end. And they're like, "I guess there's no more." We're standing there with our fly rods in our hands like, "There's no more bugs. We're depressed." But we fish well into July, like in Pennsylvania. I think some of the latest I had was July 10th or 12th or something. The cicadas were done by the 25th of June or so. The fish remember, you're not going to catch, obviously, it's not going to be all craziness like it was, but you're still going to be able to fish it.
Katie
I know that this is probably an answer that humans can't possibly know, because we can't be in the mind of a fish. But if you had to guess, does it seem more like the fish notice that there's something happening and they're like, "Well, this is the sixth day in a row I've seen this. It's probably time to start eating these." Or do you think there's something deep within them that knows that there are these cyclical things that there is a bumper crop of cicadas? Because obviously, they would have evolved together. So it makes me wonder if there's some instinct in there where something triggers in them seeing all the cicadas and of knowing that that's a thing that they've been waiting for. I know we can't probably know, but what's your opinion on that?
Dave
I believe it 100%. I have so many examples of it. I believe it's by... I love small mouth bass and I love fishing for small mouth bass throughout the year. Watching them through their summer patterns, I know they know a dragonfly and I know they know a damselfly and an annual cicada and things that aren't even around in prolific numbers and they hunt and I know they do. And to answer your question even more definitively, we've watched this several times with periodical cicadas. We have watched, so if you think of bluegill, right? You ever fish for bluegill? They're pretty easy, right? So they're really inquisitive. So you throw something on the surface and they all kind of go, "Whoa!"
Katie
Yeah.
Dave
They flock, like 10 of them flock to it and they're all looking at it and then one takes a bite. We've seen, you know, big cicadas fall out of a tree and a whole school of bluegill are underneath it. And they drag it down, pull it underwater and are all taking bites out of it. We have seen carp come by and steal the cicada right from the bluegills. And we've seen the light bulb go off on these carp where another bug falls and the bluegill jumps up and it pulls it down and the carp swoops in. And then by the third or fourth time, the carp's like, wait a minute. I don't need these bluegill. These bugs are up there and they start looking. They start hovering around and finding their own. And so when you take a bottom feeding bug or a bottom feeding fish, a fish that is designed to look downward into the mud and it is figured out by learning, by being aware of its environment, that that food is on the top, they completely switch. And then I think they tell their friends. I sound like a crazy person, but I believe it because I've got we've seen thousands of them do this and they start to hunt in packs. And they I believe they won't eat anything else but cicadas until they're gone. They completely shift.
Katie
What's interesting about your example, though, is that I was I was thinking more of like an instinct, like they've they've evolved together for millions of years, but carp are not native. So they would not have been around cicadas for millions of years. So that might be either like a newer, kind of a quick evolution in the past. I don't know when carp were introduced, but 100 years or one or 200 years. But or maybe they are just, you know, once they maybe they're smart enough to see something a couple of times and start to adapt their behavior in just a couple instances of something.
Dave
You know what, I have one for you on that. And I thought about this a lot.
Katie
OK, OK.
Dave
Right. They're not native species, right? Here's another non-native species, the mulberry. The mulberry tree is not native. It is from the same place carp are from. You can fish mulberries on carp and those carp in a river will find a mulberry tree. They will sniff it out. They will find a mulberry tree and they will hang under it in June and eat mulberries. It's so weird.
Katie
Because then there's something in them that can't recognize-
Dave
There's something in them, yeah.
Katie
--couldn't recognize something. So maybe that's an example of a fish being able to have that kind of instinct memory as evidence for these other fish that did grow up with cicadas.
Dave
They learn from the bluegill, right? And it's funny. We also see catfish, which some are native, right? And they're amongst some of the first fish to find cicadas, believe it or not, especially in lakes. the bottom of bottom feeders, like the catfish, find cicadas before everybody else. We catch tons of cicadas early in, or tons of catfish on cicadas early on in emergence. The the Penn State and the then the PA game commission did a study on wild turkeys and cicadas. And there is a direct connection to the survival of turkeys with that follow that high cicada emergency years. So that bumper crop makes them flourish. Pretty cool.
Katie
What about the annual cicadas? So for folks like me who don't have these mega hatches, if I want to take advantage of the annual cicadas, tell me how fishing for those would differ. Are those prolific enough to really trigger a similar response or do you have to kind of cater your behavior a little differently to those fish if you want to catch them?
Dave
Yeah, that's a funny thing and I fished a bunch of that out west in in Utah and Arizona. In its time of year, so what's interesting is the cicadas that you have right where you are, that one of the like really good fishable ones is a small cicada and it's from the family Platypedia. Platypedia putnami is the name and it's actually a unique cicada called a clicker cicada. They don't have the anatomy to make sounds like every other cicada. They just, the males lack it. So what they do to make a sound is they flex their wing vein and it makes like a click if you ever heard like a dog clicker those little quicker things they train with sounds just like that or it sounds like somebody breaking wooden matchsticks. But it's time of year those cicadas will merge for you in the front range sometime middle of June. So so end of May middle of June, and you're going to be experiencing runoff at that time, but there's no real big dry fly at that time of year. And this cicada is about an inch and a quarter long. So it's a pretty big bug and they happen enough. So there's enough bugs on the years that there's there, you know, there's a, there's, there's a good emergence of them. They'll, they'll vary in how many, but a lot of front range streams, the big Thompson has them. Um, and it's going to be weird because you got to get it kind of right where, you know, it depends on runoff. It could be completely blown out or not, but you can fish those things. Take a look around and listen and you'll hear the males making this clicking sound. Um, on tail waters, like, uh, Lee's ferry on the Colorado river, same species of Cicada lives there. And those are, so it's something to do with the like semi arid kind of semi desert landscape. those bugs pretty prolific there. The Green River in Utah, that's their small cicada. So it's interesting, those are two tailwaters. We just so happen, human intervention put trout rivers there and those bugs have always been there. So it's a desert variety cicada that happens in pretty good numbers and thrives on small vegetation. So not gigantic trees like we have in the East, the deciduous forest, but small brush. And it's going to happen in May and June. So keep a lookout for that. And it'll be the biggest bug. So I think fish know. And if they look at it, and they're like something fluttering around on the surface, now we have stoneflies shortly in that time period as well, and maybe a little bit before then. So they're kind of maybe used to looking up. And then that thing happens. And you can totally, definitely fish those things. And that is really attractory. So a dark stimulator works pretty well. hippie stomper works really well and you know those kind of things.
Katie
Is a tailwater the place to go because you can kind of maybe get a more controlled flow because I'm just picturing in runoff I'm usually throwing like a squirmy worm or a Pat’s or something like that to get down deep and you know get the fish down at the bottom where they're where they're hiding out from the fast flows but it sounds like if you found a tailwater where they were coming out that would be kind of the ideal situation to catch both dry fly eating fish and the emergence at the same time.
Dave
Yeah, for sure. So like the green, green in Utah is a perfect example. I mean, it is it's been talked about almost since that became a fishery. You know, it's a relatively new tailwater, I think 1963, maybe something like that. And put some trout in there. And within like three or four years, it was like a blue ribbon trout fishery. Incredible. But their I mean, their guides, so the guide services that that serve the green below flaming gorge, they are booked May and June. Like it is, they, they promote their year around cicadas. And then they, yeah. And then they also have, um, they have a cricket, this Mormon cricket, which is this crazy bug, another terrestrial bug that happens right after that in some years. And, uh, when they have a really good year, I was there in, I don't know, 20, 22 maybe, and had a really great cicada fishing in the first week of June. And when I left a week later, this cricket plague started and it was insane. You'll see these they can't swim, when a cicada or cricket gets on the water, they can't do anything but like, kind of try to get out for their life. And it's just voracious trout eating them. It was good, Like not fishing anything but cicadas. Like forget the dropper, forget anything else, just fish cicadas.
Katie
Well, is there anything else that we didn't talk about for cicadas that you think would be an important thing to bring up for somebody who might want to go chase them that we just we didn't cover yet?
Dave
Yeah. So I mean, I led you through that you wanted to talk gear and stuff. So I led you through the, you know, got to find them, you got to figure out where they're going to be and then go scout a little bit and then get lucky. So your patterns, black and orange for these periodicals. Your cicadas too out there are black and orange, they're just a bit smaller. I, you know, if I'm fishing trout, I'm probably fishing a five or a six weight typically. I'll actually downsize my hooks to, even though it's a big fly, I'll probably go to size eight and pinch the barb because you're gonna get a lot of small trout eating these things. And if you use big hooks for that fly, going to impale a lot of fish. It's not going to be good. So you probably shouldn't. In the east, we've got to watch water temperatures. So I tell everybody, if you're going to chase trout, when we have periodicals, you better have a thermometer. It's going to be June and we're on the verge of those temperatures above 65 that are going to be bad. And cicadas are active when it's hot. So you're looking at blue sky days, middle of the day is the best fishing. But if If you got water temps that aren't conducive for it, don't do it. Go fish for carp, go fish for warm water fish. I'm using a five or six weight. There's no X's in your tippet. It's just fish 10 pound. (laughs) If you're fishing for bigger species, obviously fish heavier stuff, 15 or 20. This last summer, we fished in the South and we encountered grass carp that were up to 50 inches and about 50 pounds. So we caught several high forties grass carp. Just to give you an example, we're using seven weight fiberglass fly rods with 15 pound fluorocarbon and never broke a fish off. So, using, I believe in fiberglass for really big fish, it really helps your tip it out. It really helps your fish fighting. You can lift fish pretty well with fiberglass. It's a reason why pelagic rods and tuna fishermen fish fiberglass, 'cause you can lift those fish from the depths. But for trout, five or six weight graphite, using just a weight forward line. I like the bass taper line for turn it over a bigger fly. And fishing from a boat or fishing, weight fishing. And it's funny, I fish a lot of downstream. So you see a lot of people wading upstream to fish trout. I fish a lot of downstream when I'm doing this.
Katie
Why is that?
Dave
Well, if you can, if you get a river where you can wade in the middle, so you can get out in the middle of the river. And so trout are gonna be where you find them. And when you're fishing cicadas, they kind of can be everywhere. They don't line up typically in a holding riffle or anything. The trout is almost on a hunt when they're keyed on cicadas. So they'll kind of be anywhere, but they will hang near the banks and they will hang over trees because they learn a couple of things. That shade protects me from eagles, the sea and me, and it also seems to be where these bugs are falling out of the sky. So I walk down the middle of the river and fish down and across, and you'll get a lot of fish that, so you just go really slow and you can fish both banks. So fish left, fish right, and cast long, cast downstream. With any of these kind of bigger bugs, you do have to wait, right? So when a fish eats, especially if you're facing it downstream, you could pull that fly out of its mouth. Well, you gotta let 'em eat it, go down. So if you can get that kind of control, you know, you'll hook more fish.
Katie
Well, last thing I wanted to ask you about before we wrap up is the boat. I don't know if it's a company or just a passion project, but the boats you make. I'd like to hear a little bit about that.
Dave
Yeah, that's been going on for a couple of decades. So 1999, built my first wooden drift boat. And that was just kind of a result of like just being kind of young and poor-ish and having a young family and things like that. And then saying, you know, I had this great river near me. I fished the Youghiogheny River a lot near my home and saying, I really wish I had a boat. And I never saw a drift boat on that river before then. And started looking around and saw the sticker shock of what a drift boat costs. And I was like, well, that's not gonna happen. Also in my family, my dad was a woodworker, really handy, really, really good. My grandfather was a woodworker as well. And I learned all that stuff. So I was always with them and kind of got those skills. And I found after learning about drift boats that they were kind of developed in Oregon and they were, it was kind of a handyman, do it yourself thing at first. It was a couple of guys that kind of created it and they caught on and the drift boats we have today are based on those original kind of examples of that stuff. And it was all kind of a DIY thing in the beginning. And I thought, "Oh, that's perfect for me." So I tracked down some plans that were off of original boats, the original designs from the 30s, 40s, and that stuff gets me. So I'm like a real sucker for like the tradition of it, of it all. So I thought that's cool. So got in touch with the guy and got the plans. And actually his name's Roger Fletcher, became lifelong friends with him since then. And I started to, I built my first boat. And then, you know, one of my fishing friends was like, "I want a boat." And I was like, "Well, I'll tell you what you get. "I'll sell you that one that I just made "like a couple of years ago, "'cause I'm gonna build a new one." And then I built another one and another one. And same thing, all my friends have my old boats. So it's pretty cool that I get to see like my first boats and go fish out of them all the time. And then I started to get like to understand these things a lot more and then say, looking at where these boats were developed in Oregon, you've got crazy whitewater rivers. And I've been down a bunch of them, the McKenzie, the Rogue, and that's where these things were really originated. And I come back home and I was like, our rivers are nothing like that. They're flat. You've been on the Allegheny and French Creek and everything else. And we barely have a class two. So I said, well, the performance that you need for that kind of whitewater river isn't the performance that I need for this. A boat that's maybe less rockered, which is like less of the crescent shape, more flatter, would allow it to sit higher. And you wouldn't sacrifice any maneuverability because your river really doesn't require it. So I was all about a boat that really sat on top of the water as close as you could get. So I started to flatten these profiles out, made a lot of cardboard and paper models, and figured it out. And then I built real ones and tweaked those designs and came up with my own boats. If you look at my website and see the Fly Fisher Skiff and the DriftPram, those are all serving a purpose that we had at the time of, hey, this small river doesn't have a boat ramp. We need a small boat that we can throw over guardrail and drag through the woods and that. So I built those boats and this was before all of like the ultralight rafts that we have today and things that are pretty awesome. So I started that and then I, you know, people see him, whatever, and I don't, I didn't sell boats or any of that, but what the company became was I just carrying on the tradition of what they did out West is selling plans. So my plans have been all over the world, built everywhere, near and far. So it's kind of pretty cool. And it's fun to watch. It's like we're going into winter and I just sold a whole bunch of plans because it's like people looking for that one project and whatever. So yeah, it's served a purpose. And I still run a wood boat today. And I have raft for other things and you get a lot of looks and you get a lot of people want to talk. I've been pulled over by three different police at different times as I'm trying to rush to the river after work to go squeeze a couple hours of fishing and it's like what the heck did I do? One even turned his lights on and I was like what did I do? And he's like oh I just want to talk to you about your boat. I'm like I'd rather go fishing. So yeah that kind of stuff happens.
Katie
That's probably the best thing you can be told though when you get pulled over I just wanted to ask about your book. Yeah, right. Well, Dave, just to wrap up, remind people where they can find your book, what it's called, anything else you want to share, maybe these boat plans, anything you want to share with the public.
Dave
Yeah, sure. So my book is Cicada Madness on Stackpole Books. You can buy it anywhere you can buy books. So if you look on Amazon, it's there. You can BarnesandNoble.com, direct from the publisher. Lots of great fly shops are carrying my book. So thank you to anyone who is. It can, if you do want an autographed copy, you can reach out to me directly. I have a few on hand all the time. I'm really easily reached through my website, which is www.downhomeboatworks.com. I get emails all the time, answer emails daily on that. And then my Instagram, @downhomeboatworks, is pretty easy to get to me. Lots of cicada content on there, some drift boat content on there, a lot of fishing and some hunting as well.
Katie
Perfect. Well David this is a lot of fun. Maybe I'll reach out this next summer if I find some cicadas out here. I'll be listening for the click that you've told me about. But I just really appreciate you taking the time to come on today.
Dave
Right on. Thanks Katie.
Katie
All right that's a wrap. Thank you all for listening. If you want to find all the other episodes as well as show notes you can find those on fishuntamed.com. You'll also find a contact link there if you want to reach out to me and you can also find me on Instagram @fishuntamed. If you want to support the show you can give it a follow on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app and if you'd like to leave a review it would be greatly appreciated. But otherwise thank you all again for listening I'll be back here in two weeks with another episode. Take care everybody.
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