Thick With Crickets : Nevada Officials Fear Comeback by Voracious Insect

Nevada agricultural officials on Thursday declared victory in their war against the Mormon cricket but warned that unless the drought eases, next year’s fight against the voracious pest could be the toughest in the state’s history.

Robert Gronowski, who coordinated Nevada’s anti-cricket campaign, said the pesky bugs--notorious for their size and hearty appetites--are “mostly mating and laying eggs now” and have lost interest in eating.

But the insects have infested 1.5 million acres--more than double the acreage they occupied just three months ago--and unless a cold, wet spring kills off millions of hatchlings, Nevada is in for “the fight of our lifetime” next year, Gronowski said.

“The battle is just about over--for now,” said Gronowski, the state’s director of plant industry. “We met our objective, which was to keep ‘em out of towns and out of crops, but we didn’t make a dent in the population. Without cooperative weather, all of northern Nevada will be infested next year.”

Several other Western states, meanwhile, also battled Mormon cricket infestations and are anxiously wondering what 1991 will bring. Larger-than-normal populations were reported this year in Arizona, Utah, Wyoming and Idaho, and Colorado had a small infestation as well.

In Utah, stretches of interstate freeways this spring were “just black with crickets,” and some portions were even closed briefly by authorities, reported Van Burgess, that state’s director of plant industry.

Alfalfa and grain farmers reported some crop losses to the cricket hordes, but suffering more were Utah’s cattlemen. The insects chomped so much rangeland that ranchers--already coping with scarce forage because of the persistent drought--are struggling.

“Lots of ranchers are having to buy supplemental feed, and with alfalfa at $100 a ton here, that gets expensive,” Burgess said.

Arizona’s first infestation in at least four decades occurred this year near Colorado City, 80 miles north of the Grand Canyon. No towns were threatened, but crickets ate “everything in sight--just cleared 5,000 acres clean down to the ground,” said Ivan Shields, director of the state’s Commission of Agriculture and Horticulture.

“They’ve left nothing for the cattle, the deer and the elk,” lamented Shields, adding that officials were unable to use aerial spraying against the bugs because of several endangered plant species in the area.

Mormon crickets, actually members of the longhorned grasshopper family, can grow as big as mice and have an alarming habit of traveling in massive bands. The bugs, which cannot fly but can march five miles in a day, were named for Mormon settlers in Utah whose homesteads were overrun by crickets in 1848.

In Nevada, this year’s infestation was the worst since the 1930s, when entire towns were invaded by bands stretching 12 miles long. Although an aggressive poisoning campaign prevented major damage to the infested region’s $66-million hay crop, the crickets munched flower and vegetable gardens, slickened freeways and even prompted the temporary closure of Winnemucca’s municipal airport. Six counties in northeastern Nevada were infested, and the bugs surprised entomologists by turning up in places they had never been spotted before.

The Winnemucca area represented the front line of Nevada’s cricket battle. June Stannard watched in horror one Saturday in June as a band of crickets closed in on her home about 10 miles from town.

“It was awful,” Stannard recalled. “There were so many, the road looked like it was moving. It looked like a sea.”

The bugs bypassed Stannard’s place, but several neighbors weren’t so lucky. One woman watched helplessly as a seemingly endless line of crickets invaded her garden and then climbed methodically up her screen door and the side of her trailer home.

Other residents were forced to house their dogs in town with friends because the animals tended to “gorge themselves on crickets and get sick,” Stannard said.

Despite such horror stories, Gronowski said things could have been worse. If crews hadn’t begun laying poison early this year, “then there’s no doubt the crickets would be playing the slot machines at Winners (a casino in downtown Winnemucca) right now,” he said.

And, although they felt besieged, the plucky people of Winnemucca seemed to cope well with the unwanted guests--and some even made a buck off of them. Several stores are still hawking Mormon cricket T-shirts, and the Convention and Visitors Bureau--after initially fearing that news stories on the giant bugs might scare off tourists--reports instead that scores of motorists are pulling off the freeway in hopes of spotting the famed insects.

“We get 75 calls a week, easy, on the crickets,” a spokeswoman for the bureau said. “A lot of them are from people who want us to mail them a cricket. . . . We also get calls from conventioneers who want to know whether to wear high boots.”