Grasshopper
Grasshoppers eat large quantities of foliage both as adults and during their development, and can be serious pests of arid land and prairies. Pasture, grain, forage, vegetable and other crops can be affected. Grasshoppers often bask in the sun, and thrive in warm sunny conditions, so drought stimulates an increase in grasshopper populations. A single season of drought is not normally sufficient to stimulate a major population increase, but several successive dry seasons can do so, especially if the intervening winters are mild so that large numbers of nymphs survive. Although sunny weather stimulates growth, there needs to be an adequate food supply for the increasing grasshopper population. This means that although precipitation is needed to stimulate plant growth, prolonged periods of cloudy weather will slow nymphal development.
Assumption Chapel
Large black clouds made up of thousands of grasshoppers moved from field to field, from county to county. One historian reported that "grasshoppers, sixty to eighty per square yard, could devour one ton of hay per day each forty acres they covered." The grasshoppers ate everything and anything: crops, fruit trees, wooden fork handles and even items of clothing. In her book "On the Banks of Plum Creek", Laura Ingalls Wilder records her eyewitness accounts of the plight of these plagues. She relates how they could not even keep grasshoppers out of the milk pail while milking. She tells how some of the men headed to the eastern side of the state to find work with the harvest as those farms had not been infected with the grasshoppers.