Year of the hoppers and crickets

[vicrider 0]

I posted this on another board but thought I'd see how many found this true in their area.

 

Having read in a post by Hellmtflies about the abundance of hoppers on his waters this year it makes me wonder if other areas are being inundated by them. I'm now living in OK just a few miles from TX border on west edge and I've been here ten years now since retiring. We have never had a year with the amount of both crickets and hoppers here. We have been having a problem with crickets finding there way into the house someway and have been killing 2 or 3 a day for quite awhile. Used to maybe see 1 or 2 in a normal year. The wife works hard to have one of the nicest front yard flower gardens in town. This year the hoppers have killed and eaten everything off early.

I can't really point to anything unusual about the summer season here. More rain than normal early in year, so much so that OK was drought free state wide and that's a rare happening. Then it turned into the usual hot, dry and windy summer like any other. Maybe a little cooler before the 100's moved in on us but this is normal heat here and nothing out of the ordinary. It does seem like there is something different every year though and we've had the summer of the hummingbirds, the summer of the moths, and this year the summer of the hoppers.

Nick

 

PS...With a calm weather season since early spring we have not had reason to use our outside underground storm shelter in months. Got down there once in spring but tornado flew over us and hit several miles away. My son went down there to get a spare tire for a trailer and he said it was like a Stephen King movie. The noise alone was scary with them jumping and hitting the walls and objects down there. He said there hundreds of them on floor and walls and anything they could climb up on. Looks like a job for the shopvac soon.

[mikechell 0]

Hoppers and crickets go through population swings. Must be a swarm year, when they get so over populated they start starving themselves out of an area and have to move to find food.

Here, in my neck of the woods, we had an abundance of Lubbers a couple of years ago. This year, I've only seen one or two of them.

[tjm 0]

We stopped at a burger place in Bentonville, Ar last week and the ground out side the place had thousands of black crickets, area ~8'x40', lady said they came from the down spouts with the rain and that what we were seeing was far less than had been there the day before. I haven't noticed any place else in the area that has more of crickets or hoppers than in a normal year.

[RickZieger 0]

We seem to have abut the same number this year.

 

Rick

[flytire 0]