This Lancaster County native, locksmith is chasing cicadas across the US

Cicada chaser Dean Evans is back from a whirlwind 2,200-mile, 36-hour road trip through nine states in which he collected dozens of the crazy-looking bugs from two broods that last crawled out of the earth 13 and 17 years ago, respectively.

The Lancaster locksmith also returned with a dozen specimens of bedbugs that he found drawing blood from him one night in a seedy St. Louis motel. And, oh yes, a guinea pig he rescued from Bloomsburg and brought back to join the nine other rescued guinea pigs he and his wife, Lisa, care for in a small refurbished cottage along the Susquehanna River near Delta, York County.

The 57-year-old Evans, who until this year spent 32 years living in Lancaster’s Cabbage Hill neighborhood, has been collecting bugs since he was 7 and flipped over a dead bird to find it full of writhing maggots.

Not just insects. He has amassed tons of minerals and fossils, as well as animal skins, taxidermy mounts, sea shells, Indian artifacts and the like that he shows for free in hands-on presentations to groups as part of the Keystone Natural History Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit he founded. See the group’s Facebook page for more information.

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But back to the cicada road trip. What drove Evans to hit the pavement isn’t the droning summer cicadas we see here in Lancaster County each summer. Rather, they are the so-called periodic cicadas that burrow underground only to emerge and lay eggs every 13 or 17 years. There are 12 broods of 17-year cicadas and three 13-year broods in the eastern and midwestern U.S.

After observing, photographing and collecting Brood X, a 17-year cicada that appeared in parts of the country in 2021, including in Lancaster County, Evans committed at that time to witnessing every brood that comes out in the U.S.

He quickly focused on the unique emergence of two broods at the same time near each other in the Midwest in late May and June of this year.

The last time these two broods came out at the same time was in 1803 when President Thomas Jefferson was negotiating the Louisiana Purchase.

So, despite a bad cold, fatigue and nausea, around 6 p.m. on June 3, Evans climbed into his SUV and hit the road. In the back were a mattress, food, fresh fruit and two ice coolers to store cicada specimens.

On Interstate 40, near Cookeville, Tennessee began seeing bumbling cicadas bouncing off vehicles. “It’s bump, bump, bump. It’s like hail,” Evans recalls.

He pulled into a gas station and while filling up began chasing down the red-eyed cicadas in the parking lot with a net. Inside the convenience store, Evans saw a local deputy sheriff looking at him perplexed.

He photographed and collected about two dozen cicadas of Brood XIX, a 13-year cicada.

A few hours later, at a rest stop near Lystra, Tennessee, Evans could hear buzzing in the distance. He found a tree where he estimated 10,000 dead cicadas were piled up.

By now, he had 50 specimens of Brood XIX, so he pointed the SUV toward Chicago where he hoped to find Brood XIII, a batch of 17-year cicadas.

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Out cicidas two on leaf J7.JPG — Two cicadas in Lake County, Illinois, on foliage after emerging from the ground after a 17-year wait.
Dean Evans

In St. Louis he stopped at a cheap small motel. He woke up during the night to something crawling on him. Probably a cicada, he thought, because they were everywhere, on the pavement outside his door and briefly, in the hair of the motel clerk. Maybe some of his own collection had escaped the coolers.

But when he turned the light on he found blood and a bedbug, about the size of a small tick. Flipping over the pillow, he spied about a dozen more. Most of us would likely have fled the room screaming. But Evans calmly looked closer at the scurrying parasites, identifying a large male and several juveniles. He put male and female adults, and nymphs, in a collection jar for his insect collection back home.

He was moved to another room where he showered to rinse off the blood. But after several hours of trying to sleep with the lights on — bedbugs avoid the light — he gave up and hit the road again at 4:45 a.m.

Six hours later, near Channahon, Illinois, Evans again saw cicadas bouncing off windshields. Brood XIII at the peak of its emergence! He pulled into a truck stop and down a dusty road found a line of trees where the insects were whirring around in a cacophony.

He wondered how many of the brood vanished in the recent building of the large truck stop complex during the past 17 years and if any will still be alive to come out of the ground 17 years from now.

On the advice of a county forestry office, he proceeded to the Ryerson Conservation Area where cicadas were emerging at an estimated 1.5 million per acre.

If sheer numbers weren’t impressive enough, Evans recorded a noise level of 105 decibels in the forest. That’s like standing next to a leaf blower or a chainsaw.

“That’s loud and I heard people were using ear protection when they were in the forest,” Evans said.

With that, Evans headed home.

Evans calculates it will take about 16 years to cycle through all the country’s cicada broods so he’s busy planning. He’s already plotting to bag his next brood, XIV, a 17-year cicada that will pour from the earth in the summer of 2025 in 13 states, including central Pennsylvania. And Brood XXII that will appear in 2027 in a small area of Louisiana and Alabama.

Will they look the same as cicadas in other broods? Yes. Then why go to all that effort?

“To have that broad representation,” Evans replies. “I’m never going to see the one brood in Florida whose last known emergence was 1954. They came out and disappeared. Nobody’s ever seen them again. Nobody knows why.”

If you want to be a cicada chaser yourself, but don’t want to stray far, the next periodical cicadas scheduled for Lancaster County is Brood II in 2030.