ITAWAMBA COUNTY, Miss. ( WJTV ) – You can hear the first of the 13-year cicadas at the Oak Grove Cemetery in the Ratliff community of Itawamba County.

The cicadas are out in the woods as they begin to emerge in Mississippi.

If you live in east Mississippi, from about Forest over to Meridian and then north to Tupelo, you are going to hear a lot of these buggers over the next month as they climb out of the ground and climb into the trees and make their noises looking for a date.

If you live in much of the rest of central, west, southwest and south Mississippi, this brood of the periodic cicadas isn’t likely to show up in your backyard. Wait four more years, and we’ll have ours.

The last outbreak of periodic cicadas we had in central Mississippi was 2015. Now, I ain’t no math-magical genius, but even I know that if you add 13 to 2015, it does not come out to 2024 but to 2028.

It turns out that not only are there 17-year cicadas and 13-year cicadas, but there are also several broods of each kind that come out in staggered years. While this year, these will mostly be in east and north Mississippi, the brood hatching out in four more years will be across north Mississippi then in a narrowing band southward along I-55 all the way to Pike and Amite counties.

Now, don’t feel left out. We all will get the annual cicadas later in the summer. The kind that drown you to sleep at night and even sing in the daytime as summer wears into the hot days of August.

Then in 2028, the rest of us will have our batch of 13-year periodic cicadas as the next cycle emerges to sing us a little song or a few billion little songs.

The insect experts at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science said they’ve discovered some bleed over into new territory around the typical footprint of this year’s cicadas, as far west as Hinds County for instance. So, maybe some of us will get the serenade of the cicadas at our homes this year.

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