Grasshoppers –
There is one month of the summer that the grasshoppers in West Texas take over. They jump from every blade of grass and fly around like popping popcorn. Grasshoppers provide a great source of nutrients to birds, badgers, and skunks. Fish eat them too, their long legs and colorful bodies make for great fishing bait.
They eat grass, alfalfa, and in this picture, shinnery oak. One of the ten plagues in the Bible was locusts, which is a brown grasshopper. The locusts ate all the crops and caused a famine for the Egyptians. This can still happen in Africa, though on a much smaller scale. They can destroy whole fields, but sometimes humans turn the table and eat the grasshoppers.
Although grasshoppers can be pests, some dogs think they are delicious. My yellow lab gobbled down about a hundred grasshoppers one day. There isn’t much a lab won’t eat, even a fat, juicy grasshopper.
