Longtime local journalist Bill Radford and his wife, Margaret, live on 5 acres in the Falcon area with chickens, rabbits, dogs, cats, a flock of parakeets, goats and two horses. Contact Bill at billradford3@gmail.com.
The hungry grasshopper
By Bill Radford
Do you remember last year’s grasshopper invasion, termed the “hopperpocalypse” by some?
Well, here’s the bad news: The grasshoppers are expected to be back in full force this summer.
And here’s more bad news: It’s already too late to take some of the steps that can reduce the ravenous hordes.
But not all is lost. There are still some actions you can take to counter this season’s invasion.
I sat in on a May 1 webinar, “Managing Grasshoppers in the Home Garden,” conducted by Allisa Surbuchen, horticulture specialist for CSU Extension in El Paso County. She explained the life cycles of grasshoppers, why their presence last summer was so destructive and why we should expect a repeat this summer.
The seeds for last summer’s grasshopper invasion were planted with the laying of eggs in the fall of 2023, one of the warmest autumns on record. Such heat helped set the stage for a successful hatching in the spring. The eggs overwinter; a warm winter and spring contributed to that success rate.
Female grasshoppers lay their eggs in late summer or early fall; one female can lay 100 eggs, “so they can reproduce quite prolifically,” Surbuchen noted. The seeds for last summer’s grasshopper invasion were planted with the laying of eggs in the fall of 2023, one of the warmest autumns on record. Such heat helped set the stage for a successful hatching in the spring. The eggs overwinter; a warm winter and spring contributed to that success rate.
As for this summer, just look at last fall, another hot one. Plus, last summer’s bumper crop of grasshoppers meant there were more hoppers to lay eggs to start with. This past winter was about average, Zurbuchen said, followed by a warm spring, so yes, another grasshopper explosion is likely.
When eggs hatch, nymphs — “teeny, tiny grasshoppers” — emerge. They go through a series of molts before reaching their full adult size and are most vulnerable as nymphs, Zurbuchen said. For one thing, the nymphs can only walk and jump; their ability to fly doesn’t come until they’re adults.
(And boy, can they fly. Zurbuchen says they’ve been spotted by pilots at heights of 14,000 feet!)
There are more than 100 species of grasshoppers in Colorado, Zurbuchen said, but not all are a threat to our gardens. In the Colorado Springs area, there are three species to look out for.
Most common is the two-striped grasshopper; these tend to move in from roadside areas and unmaintained lots with undisturbed soil, Zurbuchen said, and they hatch “in bursts” following rain and warmer temperatures. There’s also the red-legged grasshopper, which are more abundant in moist sites, and the differential grasshopper, which tends to hatch and move into gardens earlier in the season than others. (In a brief follow-up interview, Zurbuchen looked at a database to see that the differential and two-striped grasshoppers are the most likely to be garden pests in my ZIP code.)
So, how do you defend your garden? Zurbuchen discussed Integrated Pest Management, or IPM, principles, with a pyramid showing measures increasing in toxicity and deadliness. At the base of the pyramid are “cultural” measures, such as site and plant selection. (There are some plants grasshoppers prefer over others, for example.) Next up are physical/mechanical measures.
“This is going to involve things like weeding, putting up insect traps — so with grasshoppers last year, molasses traps were really popular — mulching to prevent perhaps insects from emerging from their eggs in the spring, tilling and also using physical barriers, like insect netting,” Zurbuchen explained.
There are also biological strategies, including grasshopper predators. Making your yard attractive to wild birds that would love to munch on grasshoppers is helpful, for example. Guinea fowl are great at hunting grasshoppers, Zurbuchen noted, but they might be too noisy for your neighbors.
At the top of the pyramid: chemical strategies, including repellents, oils and pesticides.
Altogether, the measures add up to quite an arsenal. But there are challenges as well. The molasses traps Zurbuchen mentioned, in which grasshoppers drown in a solution of molasses and water, aren’t likely to cause much of a dent in a booming grasshopper population; she, however, noted that multiple molasses traps in a small area might save some prized plants. We’ve used netting in the past, which has been pretty successful, but Zurbuchen cautioned that you’ll want to make sure you have the netting going all the way to the ground and potentially even burying the edges to keep grasshoppers from crawling underneath — steps that also make weeding, for example, more of a challenge. And really persistent grasshoppers have been known to even chew through netting, she said.
Some common products used as grasshopper repellents, such as vegetable oils, haven’t been shown to be effective and may even increase grasshopper feeding on plants, Zurbuchen said. As for more advanced — and more toxic — chemical strategies, they’re best used at the nymph stage, she said. Depending on the species, it takes about 30 to 40 days to go from nymph to adult. While I saw a few flying adult grasshoppers by the middle of May, there can be multiple hatchings of eggs and there could still be grasshoppers in the nymph stage in June, she said.
Be aware, Zurbuchen said, that chemical strategies may endanger other insects and wildlife in addition to the “target pest” — aka grasshoppers — and ideally should be used only as a last resort or during “outbreak years,” like last year. Always read any labels and instructions with chemical products, she emphasized. Are you applying it correctly? Are grasshoppers among the insects targeted by the product?
One thing that might help in your war against grasshoppers: their sensitivity to cold. They’re likely to be inactive and not eating when the temperature is below 75 or so — say, during the cool of the morning. Zurbuchen said, “If you have chickens, that might be a good time to let them out for some supervised free ranging in the yard, or even simple things, like taking a bug-catching net and going through your yard and trying to net the grasshoppers. And people who are feeling particularly vindicative about grasshoppers will even just take scissors and cut them in half.”
Several people on Nextdoor, when I asked about their grasshopper prevention strategies, suggesting putting our chickens to use. So I will try to encourage our chickens in the morning to roam a wider area in search of grasshoppers. You won’t find me embarking on a scissors-wielding mission of death, though.
