I now find grasshoppers to be super scary. We are currently over-run with them; if you took these same shots here, they would show at least 10 grasshoppers per frame instead of only one. They are eating everything in sight and there does not seem to be any way at all to stop them. The birds are feasting and hardly have to work at all to catch one. Because of them, I was not able to get my garden to grow; no matter what I did, they selected those plants and ate them right down to bare dirt.
rqsays
They have such beady little eyes.
kestrel
Wow, is that ordinary drought behaviour for them? That sounds terrible, though I bet the birds are pleased.
@rq, I do not know about the species that plague kestrel’s garden, but many grashoppers can go into migratory phase and subsequently swarm as locusts.
kestrelsays
We are not in a drought at present, I’ve never seen them this bad… they were bad last year too but this year they are worse. They are not doing the locust thing as fas as I can tell, there are just a LOT of grasshoppers, so, so many. They are so hungry they are eating odd things, like for example iris leaves. Last year they ate the leaves off the trees up to about 7′ off the ground. I expect it will be even worse this year.
I now find grasshoppers to be super scary. We are currently over-run with them; if you took these same shots here, they would show at least 10 grasshoppers per frame instead of only one. They are eating everything in sight and there does not seem to be any way at all to stop them. The birds are feasting and hardly have to work at all to catch one. Because of them, I was not able to get my garden to grow; no matter what I did, they selected those plants and ate them right down to bare dirt.
They have such beady little eyes.
kestrel
Wow, is that ordinary drought behaviour for them? That sounds terrible, though I bet the birds are pleased.
@rq, I do not know about the species that plague kestrel’s garden, but many grashoppers can go into migratory phase and subsequently swarm as locusts.
We are not in a drought at present, I’ve never seen them this bad… they were bad last year too but this year they are worse. They are not doing the locust thing as fas as I can tell, there are just a LOT of grasshoppers, so, so many. They are so hungry they are eating odd things, like for example iris leaves. Last year they ate the leaves off the trees up to about 7′ off the ground. I expect it will be even worse this year.