Though not appearing everywhere, the 17-year periodical cicada can be found across northeastern Pennsylvania and northwestern New Jersey. See PHOTOS and VIDEO. Vote in the NEWS POLL. Watch video
It’s been about two weeks since Raynee Weidman’s rural Northampton County property became a paradise for 17-year cicadas, cropping up on her porch each morning, clinging to her trees and out buildings, and drowning out the birds with their song.
Just across Fox Gap Avenue from her house in Washington Township, Pa., neighbor Russell Stout hardly saw any until this past weekend, evidence of the spotty emergence of the insect phenomenon surfacing this spring from Georgia to Connecticut.
Not that Stout didn’t know they were in the neighborhood.
“Whether they’re far or near it’s a deafening noise,” Stout said Monday. “I told my wife it sounds like a car alarm going off almost. You’re waiting for it to end and it never ends.”
Though not appearing everywhere, they can be found across northeastern Pennsylvania and northwestern New Jersey.
“We should be at peak emergence,” George Hamilton, chairman of the Rutgers University Department of Entomology, said in an email Monday. “If you haven’t seen them by now, you probably won’t.”
‘They are around us’
They’re not at Merrill Creek Reservoir in Harmony Township, for example, said naturalist and on-site coordinator Jim Mershon. But he’s seen them at the New Jersey Audubon Society Wattles Stewardship Center in Mansfield Township.
“We have not seen them here, yet they are around us,” Mershon said Monday. “They say they’re spotty, but we’ve been waiting.”
At Blue Mountain Ski Area & Resort in Lower Towamensing Township, Pa., just across the border from Northampton County, general manager Jim Dailey had fears of a cicada plague at the outdoor, mountaintop restaurant. Instead, they have mostly stuck to the woods at the bottom of the slopes.
“It’s kind of interesting: At the bottom of the mountain they’re incredibly loud, down on the Little Gap side, and then it fades away,” he said. “At the top, you can hear them again, but we’re seeing very few.”
You can find them along the shore at Minsi Lake in Upper Mount Bethel Township. But, according to New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Larry Hajna, there are no reports of them buzzing about Spruce Run Reservoir in Union Township or Round Valley Reservoir in Clinton Township.
“I know from out of personal experience that cicadas can be very localized,” Hajna said. “Like one section of woods can have them and then you can move over to another section just across the way and there’s no cicadas.”
It looks this year’s 17-year cicada Brood II is also skipping the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.
“All quiet up here on the northern front,” spokeswoman Kathleen Sandt said in an email Monday. “Nothing yet.”
‘Just so many of them’
At the Weidman home along Route 191, just outside Roseto, it’s a very different story.
“If they just stayed off my porch I’d be all right with it,” Weidman told a reporter, relaying tales of daily, morning sweeping of what look to be hundreds of casings and live cicadas.
Her lawn is pocked with the holes where the still-juvenile cicadas crawled from their homes of 17 years. They then climb a tree or -- in Weidman’s case -- house, shed, outhouse or porch to bust free from their exoskeleton. There they dry and harden, and the males flock into choruses to draw in mating females.
“You can hear it getting louder and louder and louder,” her husband, Mark Weidman, said of the males’ song.
The females cut into twigs to lay eggs that hatch and fall to the ground, where they begin their lengthy maturation process. This brood, as periodical cicadas are grouped into, won’t reappear until 2030.
They do not sting or bite and, thankfully for those in their midst, are quiet after dark.
“I got up this morning at 6 and they were going,” Raynee Weidman said Monday. “Yesterday it was very loud. You couldn’t hear the birds. You couldn’t hear nothing. There’s just so many of them.”
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17-YEAR CICADAS
What do they want? To mate, after having lived underground as nymphs for 17 years.
What do they do? After crawling out of the ground, they finish maturing and the males alternate bouts of an ear-splitting mating call with short flights until they find willing females.
Are they harmful? They neither sting nor bite but do suck fluid from young twigs. Also, twigs slit by the female’s ovipositor will frequently have leaves that wilt and die.
How long are they around? They die off within weeks after reproducing, and the region’s next brood of periodical cicadas -- there are 13- and 17-year species in addition to the annual, summertime variety -- is not expected until 2016.
Can I help track them? University of Connecticut researchers are looking for periodical cicada sighting reports at project.wnyc.org/cicadas.