Idaho Crickets
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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook. This summer, farmers in the West are battling more than dry weather. In parts of Utah and Idaho, they're fighting the millions of Morman crickets which are gorging on their crops. Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook.

In 1848, when the crickets got their name, mormon settlers prayed for help and they got it when flocks of seagulls saved the day by eating scores of these two inch long bugs.

No doubt growers are praying for similar relief this year as correspondent Jeff Rice of Boise, Idaho reports.

Narrator: To a farmer, this is no lovable Jimminy Cricket.

(Cricket Sound) (Sound of walking)

Bigger than New York Cockroaches, and just about as ugly, they seem to be everywhere.

(walking and Cricket Sounds)

They scatter as Idaho farmer Rich Cornell walks through what's left of his hay field.

Here's what they'll do to an alfalfa plant right here…That should be knee high.

Cornell, who farms in southwestern Idaho, lost his entire crop of alfalfa to the ravenous bugs. About 200 tons of hay, which he normally would use to feed his cattle.

Less moisture this year has meant less cricket mortality from diseases which normally effect cricket eggs. This year has been the worst in six decades, and the bugs have been cutting a swath of destruction from Utah to Idaho, descending on crops in groups as thick as several dozen per square yard.

We killed millions of them, but as soon as there's a void, they just seem to know it, and they come right in, and within three or four days you've got just as many

So many that, like the Mormon pioneers that battled the insects in the 19th century about all farmers are left with is a little hope from divine intervention.

And we pray for a wet spring, wet winter next year so that maybe some of this will be alleviated.

The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory, supported by the National Science Foundation.