Cicada mitigation

Stumpsprouts

Stumpsprouts

Been here much more than a while
Location
Asheville
We have a pretty epic cicada brood on our hands here in Western NC. A lot of the trees on my property are ones I planted bare root and they just got to that 6-10’ height that these buggers just love to hammer. Including some of the worst. The black oak had more damaged canopy that I already pruned, and the cicadas took much more than I had thought. My dear prized beech, and sweetbay magnolia. It’s like 70-90% canopy gone in some trees.

What’s the deal? Just wait to see what survives, or is there corrective pruning to do? Obviously at this point in the season, deterrence is a moot point.

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The little ones could be in trouble. Big trees typically recover, as I’m sure you know. In Ohio we get it BAD every 17 years, the last being in 2021. Small trees can be covered in nets but this is clearly only practical for very few trees. Plus nets are a royal pain to remove. I’d just wait to see what dies, then determine if it’s worth pruning out the dead (usually tips).

Here’s a large oak from 2021 that has since recovered:
 

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I have 0 experience with cicadas. Around here we get ‘California’ tent caterpillar outbreaks. Literally so thick the roads become slick. Those years their host trees will get 100% defoliated. Typically this isn’t a big deal and they will replace them later in the season, yet when these outbreaks last into successive years we see some long term damage.
 
Yah, here just north of you they can hit the alders pretty hard on their big years, but I've never seen one die right away as a result of them. Sometimes they will put out a second flush of leaves that year, other times they will just bounce back the next spring. I've yet to see a year-after-year outbreak that was the obvious/direct cause of tree death. Pretty sure they have had at least a million years to adapt to it, even taking climate change into account. I do see significant effects on ornamental cherries, but also few if any deaths.
 
27RMT0N said:
Yah, here just north of you they can hit the alders pretty hard on their big years, but I've never seen one die right away as a result of them. Sometimes they will put out a second flush of leaves that year, other times they will just bounce back the next spring. I've yet to see a year-after-year outbreak that was the obvious/direct cause of tree death. Pretty sure they have had at least a million years to adapt to it, even taking climate change into account. I do see significant effects on ornamental cherries, but also few if any deaths.
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I think they are the coolest thing, their population waves are a bit out of whack due to the mismanaged land clearing. Their natural predator is a parasitic wasp, that lays a white egg on their foreheads. Don’t squash those ones, typically the wasp population boom is the following year if the bigger ‘outbreaks’. We are certainly over due, I think the state sprayed BT a few years back. This year I’m seeing a fair amount of tents so I’m expecting next year will be the fun one of folks lighting their trees on fire, and subsequently their homes.
 
Good. It was scary, as I didn't know much about these things back then. I was worried they wouldn't recover, but they bounced right back the subsequent year. It was in 2020 actually, which I remember because the fires were outta control that year, and nearly burned down the little mountain town where I was working that year
 
I’d assume it’s a different bug for sure. The ones I’m talking about primarily go for Alder, but also love plants in the rose family, hitting apple and hawthorn.
 
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