A horror show in August! Not all awe-inspiring phenomena are uplifting — this one surely isn’t, but it does inspire a sense of wonder in what nature can do. Learn about some historical and more recent swarms.
(I don’t mention this in the show, but the word “awful” originally meant “arousing or inspiring awe.” I think both meanings fit this topic well.)
Listen on Podbean:
Listen on YouTube:
Resources:
On the Banks of Plum Creek (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
The Locust Plague of 1915 Photograph Album (Library of Congress)
Looking Back at the Days of the Locust (New York Times)
Everything But the Fenceposts: The Great Plains Grasshopper Plague of 1874–1877 (Thomas C. Cox)
Adding to Economic Woes, Locusts Devastate Crops from South to Central Asia
Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0
Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):
Welcome to Nine Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.
Well, it’s mid-August, and it is really hot here. I call this my vampire time of year, not because I suck blood, but because I go outside only at night. And I mean, sometimes I have to go to an appointment, but in general I don’t like to leave the apartment until it’s dark when it is this hot.
And if you’re listening to this right after I release it in the Northern Hemisphere and not too far north, you will know what I’m talking about. But at least there are some summertime things from the past that we don’t have to worry about anymore, like this:
[sound of a locust swarm] “Grasshoppers beat down from the sky and swarmed thick over the ground. Their long wings were folded and their strong legs took them hopping everywhere. The air whirred and the roof went on sounding like a roof in a hailstorm. Then Laura heard another sound, one big sound made of tiny nips and snips and gnawings.”
That may sound familiar to you if you’ve ever read the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder about her life growing up in the Great Plains of the United States in the 19th century. And this quote is from her book On the Banks of Plum Creek in a chapter called “The Glittering Cloud.”
Take a moment and contemplate this. Can you imagine sitting in your farmhouse on the Great Plains? Maybe you’re in Nebraska, maybe you’re in South Dakota, and it’s a beautiful sunny day. And then all of a sudden you notice that it looks like maybe a storm is coming up. The sky is getting darker, but it looks kind of weird. And it seems to be getting closer and closer, but it doesn’t quite feel like a normal storm. And all of a sudden looks like little snowflakes in the storm, but it can’t possibly snow because it’s August.
This is what it looked like when a swarm of locusts approached. And then the swarm would come and cover the house, and then it would move on. But a lot of the locusts would drop onto the farm and onto the house and the garden everywhere.
And then they’d start to eat. This is what it was like. And I find that just horrible to imagine, but it does inspire some awe in me. I will definitely admit that.
So how is this topic remotely awe- or wonder-inspiring? It’s certainly not uplifting, but it is a horrifying natural phenomenon. And unfortunately, it’s a natural phenomenon that still occurs.
We’ll talk about why we don’t hear about this in the United States anymore in a few minutes, but this happens in other parts of the world. We’ll talk about that too. But remember that awe can be inspired by dangerous or negative things like huge storm waves, a tornado, and other threats.
So it’s very likely that you don’t have to worry about swarms of up to eight billion grasshoppers or locusts descending on your farm and garden and destroying everything green in sight, all the vegetation, which would of course kill not only your crops, but also your livestock who would be left with nothing to eat. Or they would eat the locusts like the chickens did, but then you couldn’t eat them because the locusts made the chickens taste gross.
Now you might ask why on earth am I talking about locusts? Because just a couple months ago, I talked about another large insect that you might find unappealing. But the locusts (by the way, locusts and grasshoppers, I’ll use interchangeably) — a locust is a type of grasshopper, and they’re not the same as cicadas. They’re not at all the same. Cicadas only eat as larva underground, but the locusts eat vegetation above ground, and they eat a lot of it as you’re about to hear.
I was thinking about this phenomenon and how horrible it must have been in the Little House book. And this was true for many people at the time. This referred to a real event that began in 1874. They came back in 1875. And for a few years afterward, there was the biggest swarm of locusts that the country had ever seen.
And Laura Ingalls Wilder describes how Pa, her dad, had been so excited. Well, both of her parents had been so excited, because the crop was so good that year. And Pa was going to get his new boots that he had been needing for a long time, and things were going well and they were really excited about their financial fortune.
There are some other accounts that show even more details about this devastating swarm in 1874 and 1875. The locusts ate all the leaves off trees, every blade of grass. They ate the wool off sheep, the harnesses off horses, the paint off wagons, and the handles off of the pitchforks. And sometimes they even got inside the farmhouse and ate the food that was in there.
People set the fields on fire to try to kill them, but it really didn’t work. And in one case, the swarm was so huge that it smothered the fire. People would throw blankets over their gardens, trying to at least prevent the locusts from eating everything in the garden. But no problem for the locusts, they would just eat the blankets and then they’d go for the garden.
There’s even a book I learned about called Everything But the Fence Posts, The Great Plains Grasshopper Plague of 1874 to 1877. So that kind of says it all, everything but the fence posts.
And this did not only happen in North America.
Of course, locust plagues are mentioned in the Book of Exodus in the Bible. God visited 10 plagues on Egypt, and plague number 8 was “Such a dense swarm of locusts as had never been before, nor ever shall be again.”
And I found a really interesting series of photographs on the American Library of Congress website. You’ve got to see these photos to believe it. The locusts came in 1915 to Jerusalem and the nearby region, and they stripped the Garden of Gethsemane bare, and the whole region bare, except for some cypress tree needles. I’ll post the link to the photos, and it’s pretty unbelievable.
And again, these locust swarms come repeatedly to various parts of the world, including North and East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, the Indian subcontinent, and Central Asia. And there’s still a major threat to agriculture and therefore to the food supply. Swarms of locusts have very recently turned up in many parts of the world, and you can find some YouTube videos that are pretty horrifying, and people are trying their damnedest to get rid of them, but mostly they’re waiting for government agencies to come with pesticide machines, and that can take a while and sometimes it’s too late and the crops get ruined.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, a swarm of locusts covering one square kilometer of land can contain about 40 million locusts, which eat the same amount of food in one day as about 35,000 people. Swarms can be the size of Manhattan, and in one day that swarm can eat the same amount as every person in New York, in the states of New York, and California combined. So that’s a little perspective on how bad these swarms can still be.
And I found a guy who has a really interesting occupation. His name is Keith Cressman. I found him in a video and then on LinkedIn. He is the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Senior Locust Forecasting Officer. He has decades of experience forecasting where locusts will appear, where and when locusts will appear, I think. So I think that’s a really fascinating job, and somebody who’s dedicated his life to helping manage this problem.
Okay, I’ve told you a lot about locust swarms. You’ve gotten a chance to imagine it, but why don’t we hear about this happening? Like, why don’t you hear this month about the plains of Nebraska being inundated by swarms of locusts? You’ve never heard about it in your lifetime, right? And this is also awe-inspiring, because believe it or not, the species of locust — the Rocky Mountain grasshopper that did all this damage — is extinct, or it’s probably extinct. And scientists are not sure why, but they’re looking into it by studying locusts that have been mummified in glaciers and looking at 19th-century planting records.
And there are some theories about what might have happened. The most prominent theory seems to be by Jeffrey Lockwood, who’s a professor at the University of Wyoming. And he believes that in a great stroke of fortune, farmers unintentionally created the conditions for the Rocky Mountain grasshopper to go extinct.
So when the grasshoppers were not flying around in giant swarms, they were living in remote river valleys. And over time during the 19th century, these river valleys became really popular farmland because they were so fertile. And the farming and other settler activities altered the river valley habitat so that the locusts couldn’t survive there. The grasshoppers couldn’t survive there.
But I did read that some scientists believe that they may not actually be extinct, and they may be living in some remote areas. Stay tuned. I have no idea.
So I invite you to imagine this horror and to be grateful for all the comforts that you have. But think also about maybe your ancestors experienced these swarms, or maybe you know people today who live in places where they still happen. Or maybe you live in one of these regions and this is not at all a story about the past.
I do think we can all continue to be awestruck by some of the things that happen in nature, even if they’re things that maybe the world needs to continue working really hard to eradicate.
Okay, enjoy your hot summer day, and I will talk to you next time.