Read Locust for Free Online

left behind. Digging into the loose soil the poor fellow was flabbergasted to find that no matter where he dug the ground was packed with egg pods. Turning over a shovelful of soil and making a careful count, he found that there were 150 eggs per square inch. Perhaps he’d been an accountant before becoming a farmer because he determined, “At this rate there will be 940,896,000 eggs to the acre, or the nice little pile of 6,586,272,000 on seven acres of my farm.”
    We might be tempted to discount this exercise in rural mathematics, except that twenty years earlier a similar calculation had been made during the locust invasions of Utah. Two of the settlers, Taylor Heninger and John Ivie of Sanpete County, made their estimates with painstaking precision, noting that “by actual count and careful average we found 118-28/54th eggs to the square inch of ground; making a total of 743,424,000 eggs to the acre, or a total of 2,973,696,000 to
the four acre piece.” Certainly not all of these eggs yielded locusts and not all of the hatchlings survived the course of development, but even if 1 in 100 reached adulthood their four-football-field-sized farm would have produced 30 million locusts—about the human population of the country at that time.
    The settlers were perhaps as stunned by the indiscriminate gluttony of the locusts as by their rate of destruction. We expect grasshoppers and locusts to consume our gardens and fields, but when these insects begin to feed on fabric and flesh something seems demonically amiss. In Nebraska, a pioneer recounted that “At first some of the settlers made vain attempts to scare the pests from their fields, but this was usually rewarded by having the clothes literally eaten from off their limbs.” And a Missourian reported truly sinister feeding habits: “They do not refuse even dead animals, but have been seen feasting on dead bats and birds.”
    From Utah came stories that the locusts devoured everything, “right down to window blinds and green paint.” The insects gnawed on decayed fence posts and wooden siding, but their gourmet delight was the wooden handles of tools. Shovels, rakes, and hoes were routinely covered in a bristling blanket of locusts. The traces of salts and amino acids that had soaked into the wood from the farmer’s sweat were delectable to the insects. Scraping loose the fine fibers of wood, the locusts slowly polished the handles as if they had been buffed by the finest sandpaper.
    Although the settlers may have been astonished by the locusts’ voracity, they were appalled by the insects’ fierce cannibalism. By flailing at the locusts, the farmers unwittingly created a grisly buffet. The surviving insects greedily consumed the corpses of their brethren, with a dozen locusts descending on a carcass and jostling for position as they tore into the mangled body. Injured locusts were often eviscerated and dismembered while still alive. The locusts were driven not by a macabre lust but by a need for protein and fat—valuable sources of energy, essential nutrients for egg development, and substances that were in short supply on the prairies. Perhaps the settlers’ repulsion reflected a powerful subliminal association between the locusts’ gruesome propensities and the tales of human cannibalism on the frontier.
Seeing the insects gorge on their own kind may well have evoked images of their fellow pioneers stranded on mountain passes in the high Sierras or lost in desert crossings of the Great Basin and driven by hunger to the most depraved acts of desperation.
    If the locusts’ consumption of their own dead and dying was not sufficiently unnerving, the account of General Alfred Sully, encamped between the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers in the summer of 1864, was absolutely chilling. A single locust or a single bird is hardly the basis for fear, but a feeding frenzy is horrifying—in history and in cinema. In an entomological version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The