The Rocky Mountain Locust creatures make a dramatic appearance as “grasshoppers” in On the Banks of Plum Creek, the Laura Ingalls Wilder “Little House” book that’s the boys’ current nighttime reading. Laura writes of them hatching and eating every plant bare before turning in the millions for a swarm westward—and briefly over baby Carrie!
… A cloud was over the sun. It was not like any cloud they had ever seen before. It was a cloud of something like snowflakes, and thin and glittering. Light shone through each flickering particle.
There was no wind. The grasses were still and the hot air did not stir, but the edge of the cloud came across the sky faster than the wind. The hair stood up on Jack’s neck. All at once he made a frightful sound up at that cloud, a growl and a whine.
Plunk! Something hit Laura’s head and fell to the ground. She looked down and saw the largest grasshopper she had ever seen…
The Cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm.
Wikipedia’s story is even more amazing:
One 1874 sighting famous to entomologists recorded a swarm 198,000 square miles (513,000 km²) in estimated size—greater than the area of California. According to The Guinness Book of Records under the heading ‘greatest concentration of animals’, the swarm must have contained at least 12.5 trillion insects with a total weight of 27.5 million tons. [1] But less than 30 years later, the species was apparently extinct.
University of Wisconsin Biologist Charles R. Bomar has some great accounts:
The grasshoppers ate and ate; they devoured everything from barley and buckwheat to spruce and tobacco. The locusts even ate blankets that women put over the crops to protect them. A few records report the locusts eating fence posts, leather, dead animals, and sheep wool. Cannibalism was also observed. One common comment was that “grasshoppers ate everything but the mortgage”
Picture courtesy of Bugguide.net. Map from Charles R. Bomar’s page.
