Missouri is part of an historic cicada emergence going on this month (May 2024), in which two major broods numbering more than a trillion bugs are involved.
I, Al Harper, had some success with fish feeding on cicadas that I thought I’d share in this trip report. Not since 1803 have so many of these big insects emerged from underground at the same timeframe. The sounds they create in a quiet forest is pretty awesome and so is the effect they have on fish as so many of the big black bugs end up in lakes and waterways.
Apparently the cicadas here in Missouri (brood XIX) appear every 13 years while those in other states are on a 17 year cycle. Since the average lifespan of a trout is about 8 years, we can assume they’ve never seen cicadas floating down a creek or river before.
I was fortunate to get in two floats on rivers that make up the Ozark National Scenic Riverways — Jacks Fork and the Current River. We were pursuing smallmouth bass on Jacks Fork. The best cicada action was on the Current.
Jacks Fork was flowing at 146 cfs when I and a buddy floated an 8 mile section of it near Mountain View, MO 5/18/24. That amount of water was just adequate. We only had to get out and pull the inflatable drift boat over shoals at three or four points. Smallmouth were more responsive to poppers than anything else although I caught a 17” bass the day before on a streamer. There were about a dozen floaters/fishermen in our excursion and I only heard one report of a bass caught on a cicada fly. We ended up with four smallies and a few panfish that persistently attacked the poppers which had a hook too large for the breams’ mouths. I did witness a cicada that had fallen off an overhanging tree limb being torn apart by several panfish. So they seemed more opportunistic in their feeding on the historic hatch than the Bronzebacks on that day.
During the float and our stay at Bunker Hill retreat on Jacks Fork, I met a transplant to MO from Chicago named Bobby who has good connections with the fly fishing community and is very attuned to the cicada event. He wade fished a section of the Current before driving down and had a phenomenal outing with great success using cicada flys.
On Sunday rather than floating another section of the Jacks Fork, Bobby and I decided to float the Current about an hour directly north. Things looked promising right off the bat as we netted three trout within about 50 yards of our launch point, all on cicada flys. And the action continued as we drifted deeper into the surrounding preserved forest.
The high pitched buzz of thousands of cicadas grew louder and the trout truly seemed focused on the big black bugs to the exclusion of other food sources. I threw a streamer at a couple of likely spots but soon returned to the top water action. It seemed that larger trout, usually reluctant to leave cozy places of seclusion, were willing to make an exception when a cicada drifted downstream.
As mentioned above, even the oldest trout hasn’t seen a cicada before, so Bobby speculated it might take a few days for fish in a body of water to start keying in on them. But once they do, it must change some of their feeding habits. For instance, larger browns that are believed to feed more often nocturnally were all over the cicadas during a bright, sunshiny day and often unusually close to our boat. When Bobby had fished a couple of days before, it was rainy and overcast and he witnessed large trout roving and searching for the bugs even in fairly shallow water.
We’d drift along with only the sound of cicadas reverberating around us and suddenly a violent surface strike would occur on our fly. We’d get a glimpse of either shiny silver or a golden flash and the fight was on. Occasionally the mouth of a trout intercepting a fly would seem to become a vortex and we had to get deep into a trout’s mouth to retrieve the fly.
Hearing a strike downstream would tip us off as to where to aim our next cast. We used two versions of a cicada fly and we decided that a larger version with pronounced artificial wings seemed to get strikes from larger fish. But both sizes got results. And even with near feeding frenzy conditions, we had to pay careful attention to getting a natural drift. We actually only floated about five miles but netted about 20 trout and missed hooksets on many others as well. The fish were healthy and fat. The best trout, a beautiful brown, was 22” long and must have been about 6 or 7 pounds. Several others were only a few inches less.
It will be interesting to see if this type of action is replicated on some of the other rivers. I heard one report that while cicadas were producing fish on the Norfork River in Arkansas, it hadn’t yet occurred on the nearby White River. In my fishing experience the cicada action was much like what one might achieve with really great hopper fishing, but without the oppressive summer heat. Good fishin’ to ya.
