Are There Cicadas in Maine? The Types You’ll Find

Maine has cicadas, and if you spend any time outdoors in the state between late June and September, you have almost certainly heard them. What you will not find in Maine are the periodical cicadas that make national news when billions emerge at once in places like Ohio or Virginia. Maine’s cicadas are annual species that show up every summer in smaller, steadier numbers. The distinction matters, because understanding which kinds live in the state changes what you should expect in your yard, your trees, and your eardrums.

The Annual Cicadas You’ll Actually Encounter

The cicadas buzzing through Maine’s summers belong primarily to the genus Neotibicen, commonly called dog-day cicadas. These are the large, green-and-black insects whose droning chorus defines hot afternoons in late July and August. The name “dog-day” comes from their peak activity aligning with the so-called dog days of summer. Several Neotibicen species range across the northeastern United States, and Maine falls within that range. You are most likely to hear them in areas with mature deciduous trees, since females lay eggs in tree branches and nymphs develop underground feeding on tree roots.

Maine’s northern latitude and extensive coniferous forests also support cicadas from the genus Okanagana. These are generally smaller and less conspicuous than the dog-day species. Research on Okanagana canadensis in northern Michigan found this species typically associated with coniferous vegetation such as cedars, while the related Okanagana rimosa favored deciduous trees.¹ Maine’s mix of spruce, fir, cedar, and hardwood forests provides both habitat types. Okanagana species tend to emerge earlier in the summer than Neotibicen and produce higher-pitched, less familiar calls that many people do not immediately recognize as cicadas.

Both genera are “annual” cicadas in the practical sense: adults appear every year, even though individual nymphs spend multiple years underground. The population as a whole has overlapping cohorts that stagger their emergence, so there is no single synchronized event. This stands in contrast to the periodical cicadas that emerge all at once every 13 or 17 years.

Why Periodical Cicadas Don’t Reach Maine

Periodical cicadas, the Magicicada species famous for their mass emergences, are confined to the eastern United States, east of the Great Plains. Their northern boundary, however, stops well south of Maine. Habitat suitability modeling of 17-year periodical cicada populations found that annual mean temperature and temperature during the warmest months were the strongest factors predicting where these cicadas can survive.² Populations that once existed in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and upstate New York have gone extinct, and the modeling suggests that climate, not deforestation, was the main driver of those losses.

Maine sits north of even those extinct populations. The state’s cooler average temperatures, shorter growing seasons, and later-arriving warmth create conditions that are inhospitable to Magicicada nymphs, which spend 17 years underground and need sustained warmth during certain developmental windows. The result is a clean geographic line: periodical cicadas peter out in southern New England and never established in Maine in the first place, at least not in any recorded history.

This means that when you read about a “Brood X” or “Brood XIX” emergence, Maine residents are spectators at best. The closest periodical cicada activity to Maine in recent decades has been in parts of Connecticut and the mid-Atlantic states, hundreds of miles to the south.

What Keeps Cicada Nymphs Underground for So Long

Whether annual or periodical, all cicada nymphs develop underground by feeding on tree roots. Histological work on periodical cicada nymphs showed that they feed exclusively on xylem fluid, the watery sap that moves upward through tree roots carrying dissolved minerals.³ Xylem fluid is extremely dilute compared to the sugar-rich phloem sap that aphids tap into, which helps explain why cicada nymphs need years of feeding before they accumulate enough resources to mature. The same study noted that cicada nymphs excrete amino acids rather than sugars, a byproduct of subsisting on such a low-calorie diet.

Periodical cicadas take this to an extreme, spending 13 or 17 years in the soil. Annual cicada nymphs in Maine typically develop over two to five years underground, depending on the species. The term “annual” refers only to the fact that adults appear every summer because cohorts overlap, not because development takes a single year. Once mature, the nymphs tunnel to the surface, climb a tree trunk or fence post, and shed their exoskeleton in the familiar split-back molt. The winged adults live just a few weeks, long enough to mate and lay eggs before dying.

How Cicadas Reshape Local Food Webs

Even without the spectacular mass emergences of periodical broods, annual cicadas play a meaningful role in the ecosystems where they live. Their nymphs aerate soil and cycle nutrients underground, and adult cicadas provide a significant food source for birds, mammals, and other insects during the weeks they are active.

The ecological punch of periodical cicadas, in regions where they do emerge, illustrates just how powerful a sudden cicada pulse can be. Research on the 2021 Brood X emergence found that more than 80 bird species opportunistically switched their foraging to include cicadas, which released caterpillars from bird predation and roughly doubled both caterpillar densities and the leaf damage those caterpillars caused on oak trees.⁴ In other words, the arrival of billions of cicadas reshuffled who was eating what across the entire food web, and the ripple effects persisted even after the adults died off.

Maine’s annual cicadas do not produce anything close to that level of disruption, because their emergence is spread out over weeks rather than concentrated in a single explosive event. Still, in areas with dense populations of dog-day cicadas, you can observe the same dynamic on a smaller scale: birds shift toward easy cicada meals during peak emergence, and other insects catch a temporary break from predation.

Could Climate Change Push Periodical Cicadas Northward

Given that temperature is the primary factor limiting the northern range of periodical cicadas, warming temperatures raise an obvious question. Research tracking Brood VI between its 2000 and 2017 emergences documented slight range expansions on the order of one to a few kilometers, with an average measured expansion of roughly half a kilometer over a single 17-year generation.⁵ The finding suggests that brood boundaries are more dynamic than researchers previously appreciated, but the pace is glacial relative to the distance separating current periodical cicada populations from Maine.

Even under aggressive warming scenarios, periodical cicadas face a structural problem: they reproduce only once every 17 years, meaning range expansion can only happen one generation at a time. A species that breeds annually can colonize new territory quickly as conditions warm. A species locked into a 17-year cycle moves much slower, even if each generation nudges a few kilometers north. The gap between the nearest periodical cicada populations in southern New England and Maine’s southern border is on the order of a hundred miles or more. At half a kilometer per generation, closing that gap would take thousands of years, assuming every generation successfully pushed the boundary northward.

What is more plausible is that warming could benefit Maine’s existing annual cicadas. Warmer summers and milder winters could shorten nymphal development times, increase adult survival, and extend the active season for species already present. You might notice louder or longer cicada seasons in Maine over the coming decades, but it will almost certainly be the same annual species producing the noise, not periodical newcomers.

Tree Damage and What It Means for Your Yard

Female cicadas lay eggs by slicing into small tree branches with a saw-like ovipositor and depositing eggs in the groove. This causes a characteristic “flagging” where the branch tip beyond the cut turns brown and wilts. For mature, healthy trees, the damage is cosmetic and amounts to a natural pruning. Young trees and recently planted saplings are more vulnerable because they have fewer branches to spare.

Studies of periodical cicada egg-laying have shown that damage varies dramatically by tree species. Research during a Magicicada emergence found that some tree species, such as smooth sumac and eastern red cedar, were rarely attacked, while others, including dogwood, slippery elm, and box elder, received heavy egg-laying damage. Attacks declined sharply with distance from the emergence source, and the density of available stems created a dilution effect where cicadas had more targets to spread their activity across.⁶

In Maine, where periodical cicadas are absent, the oviposition damage from annual species is far less concentrated. You will not see the wholesale browning of tree canopies that accompanies a Brood X event. If you are planting young fruit trees or ornamentals and notice some flagging in late summer, lightweight netting over the canopy during peak cicada season is the standard recommendation for small trees. Insecticides are generally unnecessary and poorly suited to the problem, since the damage window is brief and spraying kills the many beneficial insects that share the canopy.

Cicada Killers and Other Predators in the Northeast

One insect that often generates more alarm than cicadas themselves is the eastern cicada killer wasp, Sphecius speciosus. These are solitary wasps roughly the size of your thumb, with bright yellow-and-black banding, and they look far more dangerous than they actually are. Males are territorial and will buzz near people but cannot sting. Females can sting but rarely do so unless handled. Their entire life revolves around hunting cicadas: the female paralyzes a cicada mid-flight, hauls it back to a burrow, and lays an egg on it so the larva has a fresh food source.

Mapping of cicada killer distributions across the Americas shows that S. speciosus occurs throughout the East Coast, the Southeast, and the Midwest at high densities, with the northern boundary extending to around 48 degrees north latitude.⁷ Maine’s southernmost point sits at about 43 degrees north, well within the potential range. If you see large wasps buzzing low over sandy or bare soil in your yard during August, these are probably cicada killers provisioning their nests. They are harmless to people and genuinely beneficial, keeping cicada populations in check.

Beyond cicada killers, Maine’s cicadas face predation from birds, squirrels, chipmunks, and even domestic cats. Fungal pathogens also take a toll. Massospora, a genus of fungus that hijacks cicada behavior and turns infected individuals into spore-dispensing “zombies,” primarily targets Magicicada species but related fungi can infect annual cicadas as well. The suite of natural enemies keeps annual cicada populations relatively stable from year to year, preventing the kind of boom-and-bust dynamics seen with periodical species.

Identifying Cicadas by Sound

For most people in Maine, cicadas are experienced as sound first and sight second. The drone of a Neotibicen species on a hot afternoon is a sustained, high-pitched buzz that rises and falls in intensity, often lasting 20 seconds or more before tapering off. Different species have distinct songs. Males produce the sound using tymbals, ribbed membranes on the sides of their abdomen that buckle and unbuckle rapidly to create vibrations amplified by a largely hollow body cavity.

Okanagana species tend to produce shorter, more rhythmic calls with a clicking or ticking quality, sometimes described as a rapid series of brief pulses rather than a continuous whine. Because Okanagana cicadas are smaller and often active in coniferous forest canopy, their songs may go unnoticed in areas dominated by wind through pine needles. If you are walking through a spruce-fir stand in early July and hear a rapid ticking from the treetops, there is a reasonable chance you are hearing an Okanagana rather than a bird or other insect.

Sound identification has become easier with smartphone apps and online databases. Several citizen science platforms now allow you to record a cicada call, upload it with a GPS tag, and get community identifications. Platforms like iNaturalist have accumulated hundreds of thousands of insect observations across North America, with community members contributing both sightings and identifications that help fill gaps in our knowledge of under-sampled groups.⁸ Uploading a photo of a shed cicada exoskeleton or a recording of a call from your backyard in Portland or Bangor contributes real data points that researchers can use to track species ranges over time.

How Temperature Shapes When and Where Cicadas Are Active

Even within Maine, you will notice that cicada activity is not evenly distributed. Urban areas with more pavement and less tree cover tend to run warmer than surrounding countryside, and research on cicada densities in metropolitan Seoul found that minimum temperature was a significant positive predictor of cicada abundance for multiple species.⁹ The same dynamic likely applies in Maine’s small cities and towns: a neighborhood with asphalt driveways and south-facing brick walls creates a warmer microclimate that cicada nymphs develop faster in, leading to denser adult populations.

Conversely, Maine’s coastal areas, especially the Downeast coast where summer fog rolls in regularly and afternoon temperatures stay cool, may support lower cicada densities than inland towns at the same latitude. If you live in a foggy seaside village and wonder why you never hear cicadas, the temperature explanation is likely the answer. Head 20 miles inland on a July afternoon and the soundscape changes noticeably.

Elevation matters too. Maine’s western mountains reach above 4,000 feet, and the growing season at those altitudes is short enough to limit nymphal development. You are unlikely to encounter cicadas above the lower slopes. The sweet spot for cicada activity in Maine is the lowland interior and the southern third of the state, where summer temperatures are highest and the growing season is longest. Towns along the Penobscot, Kennebec, and Androscoggin river valleys tend to have the most audible summer cicada activity.