Up Next: Locusts
What’s a crippling recession without a Dust Bowl.
“We knew last year we were in trouble — then when hardly anybody sprayed, we knew we would be in big, big trouble,” said Gail Mahnke, supervisor of Niobrara County Weed and Pest Control District, based here at the county seat in Lusk, in east-central Wyoming.
The federal government, which led the grasshopper counterattack during the last big outbreak, in 1985 — and before that in the early 1970s — has also retreated under financial pressure and is focusing its bug-killing firepower this year on federal and American Indian tribal lands. And the spring rains, which can sometimes drown tiny grasshopper nymphs, came with timing that only a grasshopper mother could love.
“The longer they’re out of the ground, the bigger and stronger they are, and they can hang on in driving rain,” said Scott P. Schell, an assistant extension entomologist at the University of Wyoming. “This year the rains were ether too early or too late in spring to hurt them.”