Cicada swarms are all or nothing in North Jersey

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Cicada swarms are all or nothing in North Jersey
Tuesday, June 4, 2013    Last updated: Tuesday June 4, 2013, 11:52 PM
BY  JAMES M. O’NEILL
STAFF WRITER
The Record

For about a week now, Pattie Monsaert-Westall of Wayne has had a new daily ritual — sweeping her front stoop. Otherwise, she’d have to take squishy, crunchy steps over the dozens of inch-long cicadas that flop there each morning.

Hundreds of translucent cicada exoskeletons are piled on either side of the entrance and beneath a small magnolia in her yard. Hundreds more are attached to the undersides of the magnolia leaves, like some kind of macabre ornaments.

Then there’s the noise — as if someone had put dozens of powerful loudspeakers in the trees and started blasting the high-pitched whine of a vacuum or an entire parking lot of car alarms.

“It was so deafening over the weekend we couldn’t even stay outside,” said Monsaert-Westall, who lives along the western edge of Packanack Lake.

For some North Jerseyans, the 17-year cicada emergence has hit with a vengeance. But for others, it’s as if the strange bugs never existed.

It’s boom or bust. The bugs have appeared by the tens of thousands in some neighborhoods of Tenafly and Englewood, in Palisades Interstate Park, and among the lake communities in Wayne.

Residents of other towns — from Ridgewood and Lyndhurst to Ramsey and Clifton – say they have neither seen nor heard any cicadas. Many who have braced for the onslaught are hopeful that, indeed, they may have been spared the nuisance.

https://www.northjersey.com/news/Cicada_swarms_are_all_or_nothing_in_North_Jersey.html