ACTING STATE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
91 
“ About the 10th of April the young grasshoppers began to appear in myriads, and 
farmers grew alarmed. In Salt Creek Valley, where the best farms of the State are 
located, not only are the ordinary grains devoured, but the finest timothy and blue-grass 
meadows are entirely killed out. Farms however, lying next to timbei and biush, 
fairly escaped, owing to the supply of vegetation thus afforded, and the constant fright 
given to the insects by workmen. When once driven from a place, they scarcely ever 
voluntarily return, as I demonstrated this spring in saving a garden and potato patch. 
This was done by taking bushes and driving the grasshoppers out at about 11 o’clock 
A. M., and again near sunset. They are very destructive during the night, and should 
always be driven off before sunset. 
“Ifirst noticed these insects on the wing this season on the 27th of June at Fort 
Leavenworth, when I saw a large number above the tops of the trees .flying off in a 
south-easterly direction. Upon leaving the egg, they are of a milky white color and 
very tender. When they first began to appear in the spring, the cool nights destroyed 
many. Indeed during the entire time they have been constantly dying by millions ; those 
that remained alive devouring the dead carcases with the utmost avidity. 
“No general damage has been done in the State this year by the grasshoppeis, but 
some localities have suffered extensively. As before remarked, as soon as they had 
developed wings, they left us, apparently governed in their course by the wind. We are 
now quite free of them, and nearly as good crops will be raised as usual. 
While passing down the Mississippi River by steamboat in the middle of August, 
1867, I fell in with Mr. Fowler, a very intelligent farmer from the neighborhood ot 
Chillicothe, Ohio, who, as he told me, had been travelling extensively through Kansas 
with the view of locating there, and, with business-like forethought, had been making 
particular inquiries everywhere about this Grasshopper-pest. According to my usual 
practice under such circumstances, I took down from his mouth the following \ ery 
valuable information respecting the spring hatch of Grasshoppers in Kansas A. D. 1867. 
“When the Grasshoppers hatched out in Kansas in the spring of 1867, they always, 
even before they acquired wings, kept working gradually in a south-east direction. 
After their wings had become fully developed, whenever the wind permitted, they took 
flight and flew in the same south-east direction ; and if the wind changed, when they 
were already in the air, so as to prevent them from travelling south-east, they would 
immediately descend to the earth and wait lor a change of wind. Swallows [thought 
to be Bank Swallows, Hirundo riparia ] preyed very extensively on them, and so did the 
Blackbirds \Icterus phceniceus Linnaeus] ; and a bird like a Night-hawk, usually found on 
the barren Plains to the west, followed them up and consumed numbers of them. After 
they had all disappeared, this last bird disappeared also. It was the general opinion of 
the farmers with whom I conversed, that, but for a six-weeks spell of cold and wet 
weather in the spring of 1867, which benumbed the young Grasshoppers after they had 
hatched out, and probably destroyed many of them, the entire crops of the country would 
have been ruined by them. As it was, according to the closest estimate I can make, 
which however must only be considered an approximation to the truth, the Gi ass- 
hoppers took, on the average, during the summer of 1867, in the parts of Kansas which 
I visited, %th of the field-crops and %ths of the garden-crops. The Dog-fennel 
[Maruta cotula , D C. ?] they swept clean off everywhere ; but that the farmers could 
very conveniently spare.” 
