Insect Stories

by Vernon L. Kellogg

"Well, it would be too long a story to tell of how all the entomologists went to work studying the grasshoppers and their ways: their outsides and insides, their hopping and their flying, their egg-laying and the growth and development of the little hoppers; how the birds, and what kinds, stuffed on them, and the robber-flies and the tachina flies and the red mites and the tiny braconids and chalcids attacked them and laid eggs on them, and their grubs burrowed into them; and everything else about them. But all the time the hoppers kept right on eating; at least they did where there was anything left to eat. Stories were told of their following roots of plants and trees down into the ground to eat them; of how they stripped great trees of bark and branches; of how they massed on the warm rails of railroads at nights and stopped trains; of how enterprising towns by offering rewards to farmers collected and killed with kerosene great winrows and mounds composed of innumerable bushels and tons of grasshoppers.

"Some people of active mind and fertile imagination suggested that if the grasshoppers were going to eat up all our usual food, we should learn to eat them! And they got chemists to figure out how much proteids and carbohydrates and hydrocarbons and ash, etc., there was in every little hopper's body. And there was a remarkable dinner given in St. Louis by a famous entomologist to some prominent men of that city, in which grasshoppers were served in several different ways: hopper sauté, hopper au gratin, hopper escalloppé, hopper soufflé, and so on. The decision of the guests—those who lasted through the dinner—was that 'the dry and chippy character of the tibiæ was a serious objection to grasshoppers as food for man.'

"But you want to know the end of it Mary, don't you? Well, it was a very simple end. Simply, indeed, that the hoppers went back! Yes, actually, when autumn came they all—that is, all that hadn't been eaten by birds and toads and lizards, or collected by farmers and burned, or hadn't got walked on by horses and people, or hadn't got studied to death by entomologists—flew up into the air and sailed back to the Rocky Mountains. Or at least they started that way. I never heard if any of them really got all the thousand of miles back. But whereas in the summer they had all been flying southeast, in the fall they all began flying northwest.

"But some of them had laid eggs in the ground in little cornucopia-like packets before dying or flying away. And much alarm was caused by predictions that millions of new hoppers would come out of the ground in the coming spring and eat all the crops while young, even if the old ones or more like them didn't come again in the summer and eat the mature crops. But these predictions were only partly fulfilled. Not many hatched out in the spring, and those that did seemed to be more anxious to get back to the Rocky Mountains where their brethren were than to eat the Kansas crops. Indeed as soon as the young hoppers got their wings—and that takes several weeks after they come from the egg—they began flying northwest.

"So this remarkable and terrible invasion was over. And all the poor farmers, and the bankrupt or about to be bankrupt storekeepers and bankers and the idle lawyers and doctors and the terrified capitalists and the hard-studying entomologists drew a long breath of relief together."

"But have the hoppers come back any time since 1876?" asks Mary.

"No, that was the last invasion. There had been earlier ones, though, one or two of them just as bad as the Centennial-year one. Indeed Kansas was called the Grasshopper State on account of these terrible summer invasions. There was a bad one in 1866 and another in 1874. The invasions of 1874 and 1876 cost the farmers of the Mississippi Valley at least fifty millions of dollars in crops eaten up."

"But what made them come to Kansas? Why didn't they stay in the Rocky Mountains? It's much more beautiful and interesting there than in Kansas, isn't it?"

"Much, Mary. But it probably wasn't a matter of scenery with these tourist hoppers. Much more likely a matter of food. In those days there were no farmers with irrigated fields on the great plateaus along the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and Wyoming. Nothing much but sage-brush and not overmuch of that grew there. And probably there simply wasn't enough food for all the hoppers. So in seasons when there were too many hoppers or too little food—and if there was one, there was also the other—they flew up into the air, spread their broad wings and sailed away on the winds from the northwest for a thousand miles to Nebraska and Kansas and Texas. And that made an invasion."