A large part of the US will soon be hearing the unmistakable chirping of cicadas.

Setting aside your personal feelings about the strange insects, there is something special happening this year.

Kentucky Edition paid a visit to an end and entomologist to see what the Commonwealth can expect from an upcoming cicada invasion.

We're having a rare, sort of semi-arid double brood emergence this year in 2020 for two broods of cicadas a 17 year brood up in the Illinois area, and then a 13 year brood spread across a lot of the southern United States.

They're going to come out together at the same time.

This particular pairing hasn't occurred since 1803.

If you live out in the purchase or Pennyroyal Region, you might be able to find some 13 year cicadas this year.

That area is part of the Great Southern Brood, but Central and eastern Kentucky probably not going to see a lot of action with this brood that's in the state.

We are supposed to have a huge emergence next year for Brood 14, which will cover most of the state east of the Pennyroyal and Purchase region.

The other weird thing with cicadas is sometimes they lose count.

So we could have some early risers that come out a year early here in this part of Kentucky.

We've already seen them in South Carolina and Georgia.

They're already reporting mass emergences.

It tends to be coincided with the blooming of irises, the full bloom of irises and your kind of local area that tends to match up really well with the temperature needs that they have in the soil to start emerging.

So it should be any time, frankly, here in the sort of latter part of April or the early part of May, that's when we should start to see some of these adults come start flying around in the air.

They don't feed very much as adults, the periodical cicadas.

So they're not going to attack corn or tomatoes in your garden.

They're not going to go out and damage our fields.

It's usually newly transplanted or young sort of ornamental trees or fruit trees, people who grow apples and some of these other fruits that we have in the state.

They do get worried about this, and we put netting on those trees to try and protect them.

There are some spray guides if you really have to protect a bigger tree.

But by and large, these things, they just kind of come and go.

They don't leave a lasting impact on humans in terms of being actual plant pests.

I actually really think Kentucky has a special connection with the periodical cicadas.

We have so many broods that live in this state.

It's just it's this huge death party, as we've kind of alluded to.

I mean, it's all it's a symbol of rebirth, of renewal.

We kind of call the cicadas the guardians of time, these particular species, because they have this exaggerated life cycle.

It's just this every 17 or every 13 year reminder that that nature has power and it gets to come out and kind of do whatever it wants.

And we don't have any control over it.

And to me, it is a very beautiful experience.

That's one way to describe it.

The collective song produced by cicadas, The Guardians of Time, can be as loud as a jet engine.

Last week, the noise was loud enough, and one South Carolina town that some people were reporting it to the sheriff's office thinking they were sirens.