Laura Ingalls Wilder described it as the glittering cloud dimming the sunshine, although it didn’t feel or look like a storm was coming.
Still, it appeared that something like snowflakes, only bigger, was creating a cloud over the sun in the distance.
But the edge of the cloud crossed the distance faster than the wind, and suddenly large brown grasshoppers started thudding down like hail.
The buzzing of wings filled the air, and grasshoppers covered the ground, devouring every bit of plant material in sight.
“That’s a pretty good description of how devastating the grasshoppers were,” Homestead National Monument of America Resource Management Specialist Jesse Bolli said Tuesday evening after reading Wilder’s description from “On the Banks of Plum Creek” during a presentation on locusts at the Beatrice Public Library.
A grasshopper is an insect that has strong hind legs for jumping, short antenna, five eyes, and the migratory ones have wings, Bolli said. A grasshopper can jump 30 inches, the equivalent of a person being able to jump 90 feet, he said.
Many common species of grasshoppers inhabit the tallgrass prairies of Nebraska, and there are more than 1,000 species in the U.S., Bolli said.
The locust is the swarming phase of the short-horned grasshopper, he said.
“They travel in large swarms over great distances,” Bolli said, and can rapidly strip fields.
“When we talk about these swarms, we’re not talking 100 insects, we’re talking trillions of insects,” he said.
Author Jeffery Lockwood, in his book “Locust: the Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier,” wrote that people attempting to measure a swarm in 1875 found that it covered 198,000 square miles and was between a quarter-mile to a half-mile deep.
That swarm had an estimated 3.5 trillion locusts in it, Bolli said.
Locusts are herbivores, Bolli said, meaning they eat only plants, and would devour crops, grass, flowering plants, trees, and even clothing, tool handles and wood siding.
Birds like the prairie chicken and Eastern Meadowlark eat them, he said.
Bolli said one possible reason why the swarms got so large was a result of thousands of prairie chickens being hunted and taken out of Nebraska at the time.
But can a similar invasion happen today?
Bolli said the Rocky Mountain Locust is the species that formed those huge swarms. “The last known specimen of that species was collected in 1902. None have been collected since,” he said.
Bolli said it’s interesting to think about how there went from being a swarm of 3.5 trillion in 1875 and just 27 years later the last of the species was collected. One theory as to why that may have happened is that settlers farming in the Platte River valley in Colorado may have damaged the locust’s permanent nesting ground.
“I find it interesting that four of its cousins still exist in Nebraska. Could they evolve to fill that niche? We don’t know for sure,” Bolli said.