Oh no! Those hoppers are about my least favorite thing on earth. Last year I had exactly the same problem you're having and I sprayed my garden with a broad-spectrum synthetic pesticide for the first time ever. It broke my heart to do it, and I very carefully selected late evening as the time to spray after the bees were out of the garden for the night. Spraying the chemical pesticide did wipe out the grasshoppers in the garden and it was grasshopper-free for a week or two and then millions more flew in from the surrounding rangeland. I'm not 100% sorry I sprayed because it saved my garden from total destruction, but it was really hard on the beneficial insects and I've worked a lot harder to attract new ones this year to replace all the ones that either died or left the garden because of the pesticide. After I sprayed, multiple other issues arose due to the absence of the beneficial insects, but I just tolerated those because I thought spraying once was truly bad enough and I wasn't willing to spray again.

I am happy to report that there's plenty of beneficial insects in the garden this year, and not so many grasshoppers yet, so the damage done to the beneficial insect population was temporary.

The best weapon for hoppers I've found that can be used in the summertime when Semaspore and Nolo Bait are not very effective because of the heat be is EcoBran. During a really bad grasshopper outbreak a few years ago, I bought a big bag of it and have used it sporadically for grasshoppers every since, though I prefer to apply it in a band outside the garden (sort of like an invisible fence) in the hopes they'll eat it on their way to the garden. I'll link it. Last year it was buried under tons of junk in the garage and I never dug it out and used it so I don't know how effective it might have been. We've since cleaned out all that ton of junk and my EcoBran is easy-to-reach if I need it, but so far the only grasshopper control I've needed is a pair of scissors in my hand. When I see a grasshopper in my garden (and I haven't seen many yet, but our entire area is ridiculously green so that's probably why), I just snip it in half with my scissors. That works well early in the season when you see a young one here or there, but doesn't work when they fly in by the hundreds later in the summer.

Dawn

EcoBran Grasshopper Bait at Planet Natural

won't your guineas eat the hoppers?

Yes, the guineas eat the grasshoppers, but we only have 4 guineas and one of those is broody. It would take a hundred guineas to even keep up with the grasshoppers in the yard and garden much less the surrounding pastures and bar-ditches. There is every size from just over 1/16" to those that are 1" or slightly over. Wish we had all the guineas that disappeared last year and the year before. We might have had a fighting chance!

Dawn, I do the same as you with the scissors and the grasshoppers, but they are so thick and fast right now, I just can't catch many of them. As a matter of fact, I almost tumbled over the other day chasing one that I was absolutely determined to catch and that sort of got my attention. With osteoporosis and my age, I sure can't afford to break a hip or specifically any long bone.

Today started out rough. We have a 2 month old Beefalo heifer that her mama couldn't find. Mama (Red) was really throwing a fit running and bawling from one pasture to the other. We found the calf in one of the pastures and she was nearly dead. Bloated. I have never had a calf bloat at that young of an age. No clue as to what she ate as there is nothing unusual in the pastures. So, have dosed her with mineral oil, needled her with a 14 gauge to release the air which puts pressure against her internal organs and given her electrolyte replacement fluid. Her temp is low, so I am just trying to warm her up now. There is probably a 50-50 chance she will make it. She is such a sweet little calf. Came in to get a cup of coffee.

Those grasshoppers are not worth a broken bone, so please do be careful.

Even when we had 20-25 guineas for many years, they couldn't control all the grasshoppers, so I understand. Our guineas would work their way from the front of the property (a little over 14 acres) to the back. While they were out back eating hoppers, new ones were flying into the front area. We had the biggest, fattest guineas you've ever seen, and we still had thousands of grasshoppers. In a dry year, the hoppers fly in from dry rangeland to any little spot of green that they can find. If they cannot find green plants close by, they travel and travel and travel until they do. I have seen as many as 15-20 grasshoppers per square yard in drought summers. One guinea can eat a pound or more of grasshoppers per day if they choose, but that barely makes a dent in the population in a bad year. At some point, even the guineas get tired of eating the grasshoppers and often start ignoring them and eating something else. In our worst year ever, which I think was the drought year of 2003 when we had a little under 19" of rainfall the whole year (half our average annual rainfall), the grasshoppers ate the fruit on the fruit trees, the bark on the young fruit trees, every garden plant whether it was a veggie, herb or flower, the cotton rag rugs on the front porch and even the cotton pillows on the porch screen. Oh, and they ate the fiberglass window screens on our 4-year-old house. Nothing like having to replace screens while the house still felt brand-new otherwise. We had tons of chickens and guineas and they just couldn't keep up with the endless onslaught of hoppers.

Our chickens that free-range will eat some grasshoppers, but their desire to eat grasshoppers diminishes greatly as the season goes on. In the beginning, when the first hoppers show up, any chicken that catches a grasshopper has to run away with it while all the others chase behind hoping to steal it. Later on, they're all tired of grasshoppers and just walk past them on their way to find something different to eat.

Mary, I hope the little calf makes it. I'm sure y'all are doing anything and everything possible to save it and I hope you succeed. I know, from being surrounded by ranchers, that sometimes you can do everything humanly possible and still have an undesirable outcome, so if the sweet little calf doesn't make it, just be satisfied that you did your best. Please keep us posted and know that I'm thinking of you and sending positive thoughts and energy your way.

Dawn

Thanks everyone for the good thoughts sent to our sweet little heifer, Rainbow. She was born between rain showers on May 22. She did not make it. When I looked back at the calendar this afternoon, I saw that she was 5 weeks old last Friday. Her mother, Red, and Red's first calf, Amy, had calves on the same day. Talk about coincidences.

So sorry to hear about losing that calf! We lost a couple kids this last February. It was heartbreaking.

Just a couple of ideas to try in the future:

1) Might this have been due to parasites? If there is a next time, check the little guy's gums to see if they are pale. If they are, you might use a dose of Safe Guard or some such medication. This comes to my mind, as I have a 3 month old kid who came up really bloated. He has/had a couple of issues going on. But one of the big ones is/was worms. I treated him and he deflated within 24 hours.

2) Sometimes ruminant babies just bloat. Seems like they eat something that doesn't agree with them, or... I don't know. But we have given them baking soda, either in a pan, or in a paste and syringed into their mouths. This really helps... sometimes.

The grasshoppers are terrible, awful, no good, very bad! Dawn is our resident expert on those. I do raise Muscovy ducks, and they are very very good at eating grasshoppers. Like guineas, they can only do so much. But they can help a lot. I like the fact that I can overwinter only a trio and have as many as 50 or 60, ready to do patrol, by the time grasshoppers start to show. But, you do have to have them near the garden, and, fenced out of the garden. Here's a link of a video I took on Sunday AM. I may not be able to keep it up indefinitely.

George
Tahlequah, OK

The duck patrol

Mary, I'm sorry about your sweet little Rainbow.

George, I'm sorry to hear about the loss of your kids. This seems like it has been a really hard first half of the year for young livestock.

I wish we could have ducks here. We and all our neighbors who've tried to have ducks have lost them fairly quickly to predators. There's just too many foxes, coons, coyotes, etc. around here for ducks to stand a chance. The neighbor who kept them the longest had a hot wire fence encircling the pond but even that eventually failed when some predator went over it or under it and got the ducks.

Some years some wild ducks will overwinter here and they seem to fly from one pond to another every few days at our end of the straight. Maybe by constanting moving they are eluding the predators.

I became a grasshopper "expert" only because they are my worst garden pest. I still feel the best approach overall is to use Semaspore or Nolo Bait every year, but while that keeps the resident population low, it just doesn't do much about the ones that fly in during the hot summer months since the Nosema locuste (which I think is a protozoa, though I don't remember for sure) doesn't handle hot weather very well. In some really bad grasshopper years when I was frustrated because I didn't think the Semaspore or Nolo Bait had done its job because we still had tons of grasshoppers, I soon learned I was wrong about that. We'd go to a grassfire a mile or two away from our place and they would have incredible numbers of grasshoppers there, and I'd realize that while we still had hoppers, we had fewer than everyone else. So, lesson learned----you may not be able to get rid of all of them, but you still can greatly reduce their population.

We try to live as peacefully as possible with all of Mother Nature's little creatures, but I'm still wondering why God created grasshoppers (and fire ants).

Dawn

George, that video was just as cute as can be. Some of the young ones looked really "focused" didn't they!

Rainbow's gums were not pale. That is something we check on any animal that has an issue to make sure that they are not shocky from internal blood loss. I really don't know what she ate that caused the bloat. We almost sent her for a post just so we would know, but our vet was not going to be available for the next couple of days to perform one.

Thanks for everyone's kind words.