BIGLERVILLE, Pa. - With warm, sunny days and ample rainfall, it's shaping up to be a banner year for East Coast peach growers. That is, for the peach growers who didn't have to deal with periodical cicadas.

A month after the 17-year cycle of red-eyed, riotous invaders ended, some orchards are still cleaning up - and counting their losses.

"They said the cicadas wouldn't cause any damage. And they didn't kill any trees," said Bruce Hollabaugh, production manager for Hollabaugh Bros. Fruit Farm and Market, as he pruned a dying branch from a peach tree on an orchard block outside Biglerville. "But that doesn't mean they didn't do any damage. We probably lost 20 percent of our peach crop."

Periodical cicadas spend most of their life - 13 years for some broods, 17 years for others - underground. This year, Brood X emerged after laying dormant for 17 years, taking about a month to mate and lay eggs. When the eggs hatch, the nymphs will go back underground for another 17 years.

It was toward the end of that monthlong emergence that the problems started, when the females began laying their eggs. To do so, the female makes a small incision in a small tree branch, then places her eggs inside the slit.

An incision here or there won't harm a tree. But when hundreds, even thousands, of cicadas lay their eggs in a single branch, the branch can no longer support the weight of the fruit. Sap that would supply the fruit escapes through the slits. The fruit, now more susceptible to fungal infections, gradually shrivels and dies; some branches simply break under the pressure.

"I'm looking out at my orchard right now, and it looks absolutely beautiful - there's a lot of new growth and everything," said Hank Passi, owner of Eagle's Roost Farm and Orchards in North East, Md. "But there's hardly any fruit out there, and the fruit that's there is small because the damage came at a critical time."

Passi, who said the cicadas did minimal damage in his orchard 17 years ago, said he would consider himself lucky if he harvests half his normal crop this year. In some early peach varieties, his harvest is down more than 80 percent.

Making matters worse, Passi has had to spend thousands to get rid of the damaged branches and infected fruit.

"You can't leave the fruit on that damaged branch, because then the infection will spread. So you go in there and prune that wood out," Passi said. "I spent $5,000 in one week pruning out all that damaged wood, and we've gone in twice since then to do additional pruning."

In Pennsylvania, the peach harvest was projected at 54 million pounds, down 26 percent from last year, although it was unclear how much of that drop was due to cicada damage.

And like the cicadas themselves - overwhelming in some areas, a no-show in others - the damage was hit or miss. Susquehanna Orchards, about halfway between Hollabaugh's orchard and Passi's, suffered moderate damage in one orchard block, but little damage elsewhere, farm manager Kathy Kurek said.

And many orchards in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee were untouched by cicadas.

"Cicadas were the most underwhelming story of the year here. We kept hearing the cicadas are coming, they're coming, they're coming, and then it was just almost unnoticeable," said Curtis Wideman, owner of Morning Glory Orchard in Nolensville, Tenn., just south of Nashville. "I had no real problem with the cicadas at all. I did notice the holes as they were burrowing out of the ground, but nothing really in the trees."

The fruit that survived the cicadas appears to be in great shape. In Pennsylvania, 93 percent of the crop is rated either good or excellent, and New Jersey orchards are reporting a high-quality crop. In South Carolina, 76 percent is either good or excellent.

"They look wonderful," Kurek said. "They've had adequate rainfall, and they've had adequate warm weather."