7-Year-Old Girl Finds Rare Blue-Eyed Cicada 'Bluey' In Oak Lawn

OAK LAWN, IL — The world is a wondrous place, especially when you're 7 years old and a trillion cicadas are emerging from the ground, fluttering in the tree tops and buzzing in unison.

With the cicada haters and cicada lovers separated in two camps, Oak Lawn second-grader Ava S. definitely falls into the second camp.

“Two weeks ago I was mowing the lawn when [the cicadas] started to emerge,” Ava’s father, Dan S., told Patch. “When I finished, Ava had filled a bucket with 50 shells.”

Dan says cicadas are swarming the area near Covington Elementary School.

“We went to the ThunderBolts game at Ozinga Field,” Dan said. “My mom was talking and the kids couldn’t hear her.”

Since the historic double emergence, the likes of which have not been seen since Thomas Jefferson was president, Ava, 7, has become a cicada expert.

“We went on a field trip at the Field Museum,” Ava said, who wants to be a scientist when she grows up. “We saw a video about cicadas coming out of their shells.”

This past weekend attending a birthday party, while the other kids were playing games and eating cake, Ava was stalking cicadas in her friend’s back yard.

“My trick is I always check the eyes,” said Ava, who has studied plenty of the run-in-the-mill red-eyed kind. “I found a blue-eyed cicada. My friends were taking pictures. Other people were screaming and cringing.”

The cicadas emerging by the billions in Illinois this spring have the trademark red-orange eyes. Finding a blue-eyed cicada is “one in a million.” The one Ava found, named “Bluey,” has blueish-white eyes.

Ava has caught lots of other live things — crickets, bees, fireflies — even an emerald ash borer, but Bluey the Blue-Eyed Cicada is a major find.

She has big plans for her cicada shells, which include making jewelry and eyeshadow.

For now, Bluey is living in a jar in Ava’s bedroom, along with the rest of her nameless insect pets, but Bluey is special.

“I can’t name them all,” she said.

Did you find a blue-eyed cicada? Take a picture of your cicada pal and help scientists study the phenomenon by uploading it to Cicada Safari (for Apple and Google) and iNaturalis.