THE WESTERN CRICKET, ITS HABITS AND RAVAGES. 163 
hatching-grounds, and a greater number of local flights from the north- 
west, but none as in the year previous from the region where the insect 
breeds permanently. It will be seen that in 1880 a few local flights of 
unimportance resulted from the progeny of these 1879 swarms. 
In this year also Central and Eastern Montana was, for the first time 
since 1801, the year of the settlement of the Territory, free from this 
pest, and to the fact of the freedom from incoming swarms in 1879 is 
due the entire immunity of Montana from locusts (C. spretus) in 1880. 
We thus have two years in succession in this Territory of entire freedom 
from this pest, although the very citadel whence in former years hordes of 
locusts have invaded the regions East and South. For notices of the 
slight swarms observed in other portions of the Permanent Eegion, the 
reader may turn back to Chapter I, pp. 10-14. 
CHAPTER VIII. 
THE WESTERN CEICKET. 
ITS HABITS AND RAVAGES. 
Very destructive in the Great Basin, to crops of wheat and other 
cereals and to grass is a large, stout, thick-bodied, dark insect, bearing a 
general resemblance to an ordinary cricket, but much larger and nearly 
wingless. Like the cricket, it is nocturnal in its habits, hiding by day 
under grass, sage-bushes, and leaves or stones, and appearing at dusk or 
soon after sunset. 
Unlike the Eocky Mountain locust, which usually breeds in river bot- 
toms and in the less elevated prairies and plains, the cricket breeds al- 
most wholly on dry, sterile uplands, where the sage-bush flourishes, and 
in the foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains and its spurs, up to an eleva- 
tion of 12,000 feet ; and while the locust may, and often does, breed at 
as high an elevation as the Anabrus, still its more abundant and nor- 
mal breeding grounds are, as a rule, situated below the natural habitat 
of this cricket. 
For example, the Colorado species (Anabrus purpurascens, Fig. 1), is 
only seen in Colorado, as far as we are aware, between an altitude of 
7,000 or 8,000 feet, 
up to an elevation 
of 12,000 or 13,000 
feet, i. e., from the 
foot-hills of the 
eastern slope of the 
Rocky 
range up to about 
1,000 feet above the, timber line, which at Gray's and Pike's Peak is 
about 11,000 feet above the sea-level. I have met with Anabrus purpur- 
Moimtain ^" IG - I Anabrus purpurascens, nat. size ; a, female ; 
men, showing the claspers, 6. 
end of male abdo- 
