Momma’s parents lived on a small farm in Thomson until grandaddy died when I was six years old. I have a few memories of visiting there even at that young age.
There was a small barn for the milk cow and a tiny pasture for her, a hog pen where a couple of hogs were raised to butcher, a small chicken coop for eggs and meat and a big garden. Behind the barn was a pine thicket I loved to explore.
Every trip I could find “locust” shells on the pine trees. I put locust in quotation marks because later I found out they were really cicadas, a totally different bug. Locust like in the bible are just grasshoppers that cause terrible problems when they swarm. Fortunately we don’t have locusts in the Southeast US.
We do have cicadas. The adult female lays up to 400 eggs on branches and twigs that hatch into nymphs that look pretty much like the adults without wings. They immediately dig underground to suck sap from plant roots.
This stage is interesting. There are about 3000 species of cicadas and they are divided into 23 “broods” in the US. Those broods’ nymphs live underground for two to 21 years!
When they are ready to molt they come out of the ground and climb up trees and bushes. The nymph sheds its exoskeleton, the shell I found on the pine trees, and the winged adult comes out. It then mates and starts the cycle over again.
When broods emerge there may be thousands of adults looking for mates. When there is a big emergence, you can hear a humming sound for miles as the males flex their rib tymbals to make the “song” and females answer by rubbing their wings together.
The adults may live for six weeks before they die, so we often hear the “song” for weeks at a time. Around here, brood XIX, the Great Southern Brood, emerges every 13 years. They last emerged in 2011 so they will emerge again next summer.
One strong memory I have of the 2011 cicadas is a tournament at Lake Sinclair. I fished for several hours without a bite while listening to the hum of the cicadas all around. Dead adult bugs littered the water surface.
When I looked at one closely I realized it had a red hue. I knew all fish that could get them in their mouth, from carp to bass, gorged on them, so I put a red worm on my Carolina rig and caught two or three bass after switching colors!
I have read that about the only time you can catch carp on a fly rod on top is during a brood emergence. Carp will feast on the floating bodies and a dry fly imitating them, with a little red or orange in it, will catch them if placed in front of a rubber lipped mudsucker eating the bugs.
All this came to mind when I found a cicada shell on the post of my garage. I guess that one got confused and I bet it never found a mate!
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Last Sunday 12 members of the Spalding County Sportsman Club fished our July tournament at Sinclair. After casting from 6:00 AM to 1:00 PM we brought 38 largemouth weighing about 66 pounds to the scales. There were four five bass limits and one member did not catch a keeper.
Raymond English won with five weighing 12.48 pounds and got big fish with a 5.96 pound largemouth that almost broke our six-pound pot. My five at 10.87 pounds was second, Jay Gerson came in third with five at 7.29 pounds and Lee Hancock came in fourth with five weighing 6.63 pounds.
I had an exciting start, catching three nice keepers, including a 3.06 largemouth, on a topwater frog around a grass bed the first 30 minutes. When a bass slams a frog working through grass the bite thrills me then I get hyper trying to get the bass out of the grass and into the boat.
The bite slowed way down and I caught two small keepers on a Trick worm worked weightless in grass, filling my limit by 7:45. Then I culled one with a two pounder that hit a jig.
Punching grass means using a very heavy rod and strong line with a one ounce or heavier sinker in front of a plastic bait like a Fighting Frog. You get your boat in close and drop the heavy weight into the grass where it “punches” through. A bass in the grass will often suck the bait in as it falls the foot or so to the bottom.
The heavy outfit wears out my weak arms and I have to sit down to fish and that makes it more difficult, so I do not do it much. But I keep a rod rigged and ready just in case. About 10:00 I picked it up and the first punch caught a 2.5-pound bass, culling my smallest one. But although I wore my arm out for over an hour punching, I never got another bite!