NiMTH Report of the State Ei^tomolooist 333 



tation of summer — never fail of exciting apprehension of its unusual 

 abundance later in the year with serious injury to the grass crop. Such 

 fear, however, need not be entertained. Large numbers of these 

 locusts, in their tender and helpless condition, become the prey of 

 black birds that come in flocks in the month of April, and feed 

 eagerh^ upon them, aided in their work by others of our early appear- 

 ing feathered friends. Furthermore, it is more than probable that this 

 premature coming forth really serves to lessen prospective injuries from 

 the brood, for the cold rains and frosts of early spring can not fail of 

 killing a large proportion of those that are thus prematurely abroad, 

 before they could find fitting shelter, even if they ar£ endowed with 

 the instinct in this phase of their life to seek it. 



The So-called Grasshoppers are Locusts. 

 I have referred to these insects as locusts, for by this name the 

 so-called " grasshoppers " should be known. The true grasshoppers are 

 pale green, unicolored creatures, with long legs, and long thread-like 

 attennce projected from their heads, of the katy-did tj^pe. There is a 

 lamentable confusion in the common names of these Orthoptera, as 

 when we speak of the "17-year locust" which is not a locust, but 

 a cicada, and belongs to quite a different order of the Insects from the 

 Orthoptera, viz., the Hemiptera. It is alwa^'s hard to correct long 

 standing popular errors, and it would be foolish to attempt it in cases 

 like the above, were it not that there are always those — albeit a small 

 minority — wlio would prefer to call things by their right names. 



Distribution of the Insect. 



This species has an unusually extended range over the United States. 

 According to Scudder, it occurs "from the White Mountains to Key 

 West, Florida, Texas, and westward into northern New Mexico, and 

 southern Colorado; also in Guatemala. It is found in loAva, Minnesota, 

 and Nebraska (Thomas). It probably occurs in all the States east of 

 the Rocky Mountains, although Mr. Lawrence Bruner, of the Nebraska 

 Agricultural Experiment Station, has not included it among the forty- 

 eight species of locusts observed by him in his Locust Examinations in 

 the valley of the Yellowstone river in eastern Montana and northwest 

 Dakota in 1885.* In reply to an inquiry made of Mr. Bruner of its 

 western distribution, he has kindly written: 



" I have taken the Ghortopliaga viridifasciata as far west as the 

 Rocky Mountains of Colorado and New Mexico; and I believe that it 

 occurs also in Utah. I know that it is found in the Black Hills, S. Dakota, 



* Annual Report of the Department of Agriculture for the Year 1885, p. 307. 



