A map released by the U.S. Forest Service puts Chattooga, Walker and Catoosa Counties as the three area counties where the highest concentration of cicadas will emerge this year.

Crawling out from underground every 13 or 17 years.  This year, both the 13-year and 17-year cicadas will emerge.  When that happened in 1803, Thomas Jefferson wrote about it, but mistakenly called the ground-burrowing bugs “locusts”.  While they may cover the ground like a biblical plague, cicadas actually don’t cause any damage – but the noise they make can be quite annoying.

“We’ve got trillions of these amazing living organisms come out of the Earth, climb up on trees and it’s just a unique experience, a sight to behold,” Georgia Tech biophysicist Saad Bhamla told the Associated Press earlier this month. “It’s like an entire alien species living underneath our feet and then some prime number years they come out to say hello.”

The cicadas will make their appearance when the ground temperature reaches 64 degrees.