Yesterday, my son and I went to the campus of Princeton University, which has long been a favorite Jersey destination of mine. I first visited Princeton somewhere around 2001, when a friend and fellow Rutgers alumni (we both graduated from Rutgers that spring) and his wife showed my then wife and myself around the campus. It was beautiful, and I felt like it was strongly reminiscent of Europe.
Since then, I had visited the campus a few times, as well. Once or twice in the years that followed, and then much more starting around 2011. Then, in 2012, I moved fairly close, in Hillsborough, and visits to Princeton suddenly came much more frequently. Usually, I will visit Princeton a few times each year. For a while there, I was visiting the campus at least once a month on average, although that was a difficult thing to continue.
My son just got out of school, with his last day technically having been last Friday. I wanted to spend time with him for Father’s Day after I got off from work, and we enjoyed the gardens at the Skylands Botanical Gardens in Ringwood, New Jersey. This is also a favorite spot to visit, and has been since my childhood, when my family first visited the park shortly after moving to neighboring West Milford. We enjoyed some ice cream later in the afternoon, and then ate dinner at Tim Horton’s. It is a Canadian chain, and is a staple north of the border, but there are far fewer of them south of the northern border. There are quite a few up around northwestern New York, particularly around the Buffalo-Niagara Falls region near the Canadian border, and a few that I saw up in Maine, as well. There used to be one on the Connecticut-Rhode Island border up on I-95, as well. One in Pennsylvania by Susquehanna, just after crossing the border into Pennsy from Binghamton. And there are two in New Jersey, one in Stockholm at a bowling alley (but it’s a pretty crappy one), and then another by me, near Hillsborough at the traffic circle. I think it might be Somerville or Raritan, although I could be wrong on both scores. But we pas by it all of the time, and he said that he was in the mood for it, so we went. It did not require much arm twisting on his part to convince me, because I enjoy it, as well.
In any case, Monday was going to be a visit to either Duke Farms or Princeton. I checked Duke Farms online, and found that, rather annoyingly, they were still closed. While other parks opened with limited basis and with mask requirements last year, Duke Farms just remained closed instead. But now, as we fast approach the midway point of 2021, and as everything seems to be opening back up fully, and mask requirements are starting to be relaxed, Duke Farms still remains closed.
Princeton it was going to be.
Now, to be sure, Princeton was the main place I had been leaning towards, in any case. But it would have been nice to have a choice, or to know that Duke Farms will be an option the next time that I have my son with me down in Hillsborough. It is always worth a visit, and reminds me a bit of Skylands.
Anyway, we went down to Princeton on a hot and stuffy, almost oppressive, early summer afternoon. And as we were driving down, I heard a weird noise. Turning down the volume of the music that we were playing, I asked my son if he heard that, and he confirmed that he did. How could he not, since it was so loud? But he noticed that the noise level did not change when I either accelerated or broke, and he was right. I opened my window, then opened his passenger side window, and noticed that the noise was much louder on his side, which was filled with woods. I also noticed that as we went away from the woods, the noise grew a bit quieter. Once we got to more suburban style neighborhoods, with the woods pushed back even further, the noise receded still more.
By the time that we got to downtown Princeton, the noise was not dominant, almost overbearing, as it had been in the woods.
Yet, it was still definitely present.
But any thoughts or concerns that it might be the car, and that I might need to take it in, melted away once we opened the door and stepped outside. We could hear the noise – which we were sure were either locusts or cicadas – quite clearly.
We had found a spot in the parking deck, and then walked outside, and I saw a dead one. I pointed it out to my son. I need not have done so, but could not know that yet at the time. Because there was another one a few paces away from that. Then another one, and then one that was alive. This was in an alley, on hot asphalt, which was a bit surprising.
As we crossed Nassau Street and visited the campus, the noise became, once again, quite overwhelming. When we passed by trees and/or patches of bushes, the noise was very loud. At one point, we decided to take a break from walking around in the unrelenting sun and humidity, and sat in the shade. Now, we could see them everywhere. They were flying around, into the trees. One landed on my ankle, another on my son while he was reading (we read together, aloud). They were all over the place, and at times, they got very loud.
This was something I had only heard of before, but had never experienced. It was something very, very different than anything I had experienced before. It was interesting, and simultaneously a bit alarming. Later on, when I did a bit of research, I learned that, in fact, Princeton has a history of these things coming around once every 17 years, something that I had been completely unaware of before. Bob Dylan recalled taking David Crosby to the Princeton University graduation ceremony in 1970, and calling it the “Day of the Locusts” (even though they were, in fact, cicadas, although the two are often mistaken for one another). They came again in 1987, and again in 2004.
Now, here they were again in 2021.
To be honest, I think that we caught them at the tail end of their periodic visit once every 17 years. As loud and as clearly present as they were everywhere we went, especially in green spaces and by trees and bushes, they nevertheless looked like they had little to no energy. Many of them appeared to be dying. One that my son pointed out was missing it’s tail, or stinger, or whatever it was. Not sure if some creature had bitten it off, or what had happened, but that poor guy was still alive.
This was highly unusual, and again, nothing that either of us had seen or experienced before.
In the modest research that I did afterwards, I discovered that these cicadas are specific to Princeton, and maybe some neighboring towns, as well. Only the males sing, to attract the females, which just goes to show the lengths that males - no matter what the creature may be – will go to just to try and attract the attention of females. I laughed recalling how I saw a beautiful peacock in Poland in 2013, spreading his impressive and very colorful wings and shaking them (they were noisy, too) at the females, who just walked indifferently by, clearly unimpressed.
This bunch were part of whart is known as “Brood X, and they span numerous states, from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware, to western Ohio and Indiana, a bit into Michigan and Illinois, and even down in North Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and Georgia, with some other potential populations in states as far away as Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. There may be some as far north as New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, as well.
Very fascinating stuff.
As far as how loud they are, they can be extremely loud, reaching up to 90-100 decibels. Again, we heard them in the car with closed windows, with the air conditioning on and the music at a decent level, and they were clearly audible. They reminded me of lawn mowers, and at times, they could be really loud, almost impossible to ignore.
Indeed, also, my suspicions were correct: they came out in May, and would last usually around two to four weeks. Since it is now fairly late June, we probably again got the very end of them, but if most of them were gone by this point, then it is difficult to imagine their presence on this day being milder than what I presume it was three or four weeks ago. Again, they were everywhere, and they could be deafening. No way for us to know, but I wondered if they still were loud at nighttime, like grasshoppers and crickets in the woods on warm nights.
Cicadas do not bite or sting, and in face, and really pose no danger to humans. They do not carry diseases. In fact, they can be good for the local environment, which I was surprised by. Guess I had mistaken them for the infestations of locusts, who have been known to do serious damage to crop yields in other regions of the country.
And yes, they sound nothing like any insects that I have ever known. Probably, the closest would be crickets, but they make very different noises than crickets. I took some pictures and videos, including one in a section of the campus where they seemed to come in particularly loudly as we were passing through. It was a courtyard, and so perhaps the closed off section with stone walls allowed the noise to bounce and echo, if you will. You can watch the clip for yourself, although it likely will not do justice to just how loud they are in person, where you feel yourself surrounded by them, and their noise.
Here is a video clip of how noisy the cicadas can be during our recent visit to Princeton:
Cicadas attending Princeton University:
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