Grasshoppers Tender Grasshoppers Tough
By Ellis Hein
Grasshopper years come and go. Some have been enshrined in our literature such as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s On the Banks of Plum Creek. In this book she described the devastation caused by a plague of grasshoppers. They ate the wheat crop, consumed the forage that fed the livestock, and ate all the leaves off trees. The following year was just as bad until all the grasshoppers started marching to the west. They did not swerve to either right or left. If a person, animal, or even a house was in the way, they marched up and over. If you had an open window, they marched through the window.
My father described grasshopper years he witnessed in the Oklahoma Panhandle during the 1930s. Not only did they consume fields of wheat and pasture forage, they ate fence posts and oak spokes in wagon wheels.
“How,” you may ask, “can a grasshopper, who has no teeth, eat wood as hard as oak?” Somehow they can do it. A friend of mine had a grasshopper in Peru bite through his fingernail. However, there is more to grasshopper invasions than Alfred Hitchcock horror movie stuff.
I have been gardening in the Matheson Creek area near Casper since 2004. We have had years when grasshoppers ate up the garden, but I have never seen a year like last year. I planted my vegetable crops more or less on schedule. The corn came up alongside beans and squash. By the time beans and squash had their first true leaves and the corn was maybe six inches tall, grasshoppers came. Every year I have a fight with bindweed and Canadian thistle in my gardens, but not last year. The grasshoppers ate my beans and squash. They ate the bindweed and Canadian thistle. They ate my onions, carrots, and greens. They slowed down the turnips but did not destroy them. They ate the outer layer off the asparagus stems. But they hardly tasted the corn.
The strangest thing I ever saw during a grasshopper year was when we had a Blue Grosbeak nesting in a box elder tree. Grasshoppers were plentiful and I have no doubt many birds raised their broods on the bounty. When the young grosbeaks left the nest, we were able to observe them begging for food and being fed by one of the parents. On a particular day, a fledgling grosbeak was begging for food. The male appeared with a tasty grasshopper in his beak. When he offered it to the chick, the chick closed its gaping beak and turned its back to the offering. It was as if it was invoking the old prayer, “[Grasshoppers] tender [grasshoppers] tough, I thank you Lord, but I’ve had enough!”