grasshopper invasion! (house, neighborhood, subdivision)

[dr.frog]

I've had a plague of grasshoppers demolishing my garden lately, and my neighbors say the same. Is it just our neighborhood, or are folks seeing this elsewhere in the city as well? The big ones are definitely two-stripe grasshoppers (brownish, with the stripes making a diamond pattern on their backs), and I'm thinking the green and yellow ones may be immature instars rather than a different species.

If you've got them too, how are you getting rid of them? Insecticidal soap appeared to do nothing to these guys. I got 200-300 yesterday by hand-picking but it was obvious I was only catching the slow ones, so this morning I bit the bullet and sprayed with bifenthrin. It seems odd that the birds haven't made a bigger dent in the population, since there were basically no moths for them to eat this year. But I've seen the robins going after my serviceberry bushes and chokecherry tree more often than I've seen them hopping around after juicy high-protein grasshoppers. :-S

[beezle1]

I read somewhere in the past (pioneer times), the plague of grasshoppers were so bad here once that they ate the wood off farm implements!
Ugh: What to do about Grasshoppers | Recorder Online

[otowi]

That's common here in summer if there's any food for them. We just work with/around them - nothing like the locust plagues of our past: https://www.hcn.org/issues/243/13695

[dr.frog]

It can't be that common; one of my neighbors has lived here for almost 20 years and told me she's never seen anything like this number of grasshoppers before.

If this invasion is local to my specific neighborhood instead of being a general plague everywhere this year, I'm inclined to blame the business that borders our subdivision -- last fall they dug up the weedy area around their parking lot and put down landscape rocks. A couple of the online references I found suggested that planting a buffer zone of tall grass (etc) around your garden would help to protect it since the grasshoppers prefer to hang out in their native habitat, so I suppose taking the existing border away would have the opposite effect of driving the grasshoppers into our gardens since there is nothing at all for them to eat on the other side of the fence any more.

[otowi]

I don't know about your local area - I just know that they've always been thick in the wild fields everywhere I go in summer here - including in the mountain meadows and the rolling prairie and in weedy neighborhood yards. My parents report the same as do my grandparents, all living here.

[dr.frog]

Just an update: the bifenthrin spray seems to have worked, at least in the short term. I'm still seeing a few bugs here and there, but nothing like the great hopping hordes that were everywhere in the garden last week.

[Phil P]

Originally Posted by otowi

That's common here in summer if there's any food for them. We just work with/around them - nothing like the locust plagues of our past: https://www.hcn.org/issues/243/13695

Amazing article! Can you imagine that now? That would make much of the US just such a worse place to live and really put a dent in our agricultural output.

Now hopefully we can get rid of chiggers, ticks, leaches, and mosquitoes, in the near future!

[TCHP]

Originally Posted by dr.frog

If this invasion is local to my specific neighborhood instead of being a general plague everywhere this year, I'm inclined to blame the business that borders our subdivision -- last fall they dug up the weedy area around their parking lot and put down landscape rocks.

This could be the exact reason you are seeing an increase this year. While I have seen a lot of hoppers this summer, I can't say that they are as prolific as in years past. Last year, I had a lot more at my house than I've had this year.

[mtngigi]

Originally Posted by dr.frog

I've had a plague of grasshoppers demolishing my garden lately, and my neighbors say the same. Is it just our neighborhood, or are folks seeing this elsewhere in the city as well? The big ones are definitely two-stripe grasshoppers (brownish, with the stripes making a diamond pattern on their backs), and I'm thinking the green and yellow ones may be immature instars rather than a different species.

If you've got them too, how are you getting rid of them? Insecticidal soap appeared to do nothing to these guys. I got 200-300 yesterday by hand-picking but it was obvious I was only catching the slow ones, so this morning I bit the bullet and sprayed with bifenthrin. It seems odd that the birds haven't made a bigger dent in the population, since there were basically no moths for them to eat this year. But I've seen the robins going after my serviceberry bushes and chokecherry tree more often than I've seen them hopping around after juicy high-protein grasshoppers. :-S

Earlier this summer, I had them really bad here in Manitou. Couldn't put a step down anywhere in my yard without raising clouds of them. Now there don't see to be as many.