Grasshoppers & Crickets

[Roy]

Around my place we have had very little crickets this year. The nights are relatively silent. At first I thought it might have to do with our cooler and wetter summer. Yesterday it hit me. This year we have had a toad explosion. Never saw so many (first year that they are coming right up to the house). Cute a friendly little critters. If crickets and grasshoppers are a problem, I can send a couple of bushels of Eastern toads!

 

[Bird]

Roy, that's interesting, because as far apart as we are, and we have the heat and drought here, but we've also got more toads than I've seen in many years. In fact, I don't recall ever having seen so many. We still have crickets and grasshoppers, but not nearly as many grasshoppers as we had a couple of months ago.

Bird

 

[Roy]

Bird, that is interesting. There are a number of people studying global changes in reptiles, mainly frogs (population counts and mutations). Maybe this is the year-of-the toad?

Last year, it was oak trees. I had probably 100 oak trees per acre. Marked some for keeping, mowed the rest down. What go me was that there are no mature oak's around me, that I know of.

 

[Bird]

Nature does provide many mysteries. This year, we had more cottontail rabbits, and more coyotes, than we've had in the last 5 years, too. They seem to go in cycles, but makes me wonder about the causes. And I've seen some things in the news about studying the frogs and their mutations; weird, huh?

Bird

 

[Alan L.]

I hate crickets. My solution to the one that keeps me up at night is to put 3 shells in my 12 guage. Then I crawl around on my hands and knees where I think the sound is coming from. Sometimes waving your hand back and forth by your ear will help you locate the source of the sound. Once the general area is discovered, I blow the living crap out of the floor and wall there with #8 birdshot, I mean empty the gun on it. Then I go back to bed and worry about the repairs later /w3tcompact/icons/wink.gif.

 

[W5FL]

It will work just as well to shoot the shotgun outside regularly without ear plugs.

Soon, the high frequency hearing loss will almost completely eliminate the cricket chirps. /w3tcompact/icons/wink.gif

 

[RJohnson]

My wife doesn't hold with spraying too much around the house (fire ants are an exception) so she went and got some chickens. They will chase any grasshopper in the yard until it has been eaten or flew over the fense. So far everything is growing as long as I water it and the grasshoppers are missing from my yard at least. Probably chased them all over to the neighbors.
Anyway WEN you might try some organic insect controls (chickens) before you start spraying.

 

[Bird]

We don't have very many grasshoppers anymore around our place; nothing left for them to eat, what they hadn't already eaten dried up and died (or else the grasshoppers dried up and died)./w3tcompact/icons/frown.gif And they tell me you can't raise chickens in this part of the country; the baby chicks would fall into the cracks in the ground and be lost./w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

Bird

 

[Hawgee]

Bird, we've got the moisture. My chickens failed too. I just don't know if it was too wet, I planted em too deep or too close together. /w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif

"What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

 

[Roy]

Chickens are great predators. Dated a lady in collage (seems like eons ago), whose family raised chickens. They kept 2 of them in the house. Were great mousers. They put any cat to shame.