The Locust Scourge.
The great scourge of the Philippines is the locust. It will not touch the hemp plantations, but menaces and devastates almost everything else green or growing. In 1851 the Government imported some martins from China, for the extermination of the pest. They were received by a procession of soldiers, with a band of music, and the cages containing them were carried in state to Santa Mesa, where the birds were turned loose. The severest penalties were then prescribed for any person that should kill a martin. According to latest accounts, however, the locusts still flourish.
The injury done by these pests to cultivated lands is always serious, often disastrous. Miles of ripened crops may be devoured in a single night. When the locust-army makes its descent by day, preparing to attack a planted field, the natives do their best to drive it away by dint of noise and glare, beating tin cans, rattling bamboo-choppers, waving scarlet flags. Others make a dense smoke, by setting fire to damp straw and other fuel. The insects are very sensitive to noise, and the firing of small mortars, which the natives use at feasts, is a very useful locust-dispeller.
In general appearance the locust looks like a large grasshopper; of a light reddish-brown hue in the males, and a darker brown in the females. The eggs are laid in the ground, which is pierced to the depth of an inch by the auger-like ovipositor of the female. She continues this process of egg-laying every few days, if allowed to settle. Two or three weeks are necessary for the hatching. The grubs cannot be driven to flight, as their wings do not sprout for about ten days, and they set themselves diligently to work to eat their fill, making havoc in the growing crops. Though they cannot fly, they can jump, and the plan adopted to dispose of them is to form a barrier of sheet-iron at one side of the field, dig a pit before it, and set a number of men to beat up the small game around the other three sides of the field. In this way the young locusts may be driven in heaps into the pit, and there destroyed. I have seen instances where tons of these destructive pests were thus slain.
Locusts have been known to travel as far as sixty miles out to sea. It is a curious fact, that, they avoid for several years a province where large quantities of their number have been swallowed up and destroyed by an earthquake.
Aside from their destroying growing-crops, these insects are perfectly harmless; little children play with them, and older people eat them, fried locust being esteemed a great delicacy by the poor-class natives. I can vouch for one instance in which the inhabitants of a certain village offered to pay the parish priest if he would say mass for the continuance of this luxury. The scourge is thus a terror to the planter, but a boon to his poor laborers.
The Chief Nuisances: Mosquitoes and Ants.
To repeat: Among the chief nuisances in the Philippines are mosquitoes and ants. The ordinary bed is a hemp mat, without sheets, but never without ample mosquito nets, in the absence of which sleep would be banished. The white ants are indeed formidable; not like the locusts, feeding on green things growing, but destroying dry wood and vegetable fibre, wherever found. They can literally devour a house; and I have been gravely told that even the surface of iron is not safe from their ravages.