NOTES ON THE WINGLESS GRASSHOPPER OF SHASTA 

 AND FALL RIVER VALLEYS, CALIFORNIA, 



AND A PLAN FOR KEEPING THEM OUT OF FIELDS. 



BY EDWARD P. VOLLUM, M.D., U.S.A. 



Grasshoppers have infested many parts of California from the earliest 

 days of which there is any record, and they have appeared so regularly 

 and abundantly as to he regarded in some places as an ineradicable 

 plague. The Digger Indians seem to have been long habituated to 

 use them as an article of food, and relish them as much as any kind of 

 subsistence they have. The winged as well as the wingless variety are 

 collected by them for winter use. Both kinds are captured by sinking 

 large pits and firing the grass in a large circle around them. To escape 

 the fire and smoke, the grasshoppers take to the pit, when they are 

 killed by combustibles being thrown upon them. Formerly, the winged 

 grasshoppers were common in Shasta valley ; but in the summer of 

 1856 they gave way to the large wingless kind, which have increased 

 in numbers every year since, till the summer of 1860, when they were 

 more destructive than ever before. During the last three years they 

 have appeared in Fall River valley, but were only in destructive num- 

 ber last summer. They always have their origin in sheltered parts of 

 valleys, where the temperature is higher in winter than the neighbor- 

 ing districts over which they roam in summer. In Shasta valley they 

 breed from or near alkaline flats, where the ground never freezes ; and 

 in Fall River valley, they invariably start from the most sheltered part 

 of it. In Shasta valley, after they commence migrating, they always 

 go to the south or southwestward ; while in Fall River valley, their 

 course is northward. In both places they leave mountains behind them 

 and traverse a level district ; and this seems to be the only cause of the 

 difference of direction pursued by them in the two valleys. In migrat- 

 ing, they are turned aside by mountains. Though they have been in 

 Shasta valley since the summer of 1856, they have been confined to it, 

 and have not crossed any of the mountains which separate it from other 

 valleys. The windings of a river may turn them from their course a 

 little ; but if a stream lay across their route, or if embraced in a bend 

 of it, they plunge into the water, in which vast numbers are destroyed, 



