There could be locusts. Like the Rocky Mountain locust (Melanoplus spretus) that lived along both sides of the Rocky Mountains in prairie areas. Entomologists believe that they depended on tall grass prairie plants where they lived in small numbers like the grasshoppers to which thy are related. But then, as a survival mechanism, when they become crowded during drought, chemical cues and frequent bumping into each other trigger a metamorphosis into a longer creature with larger wings that had rather eat than breed, and an urge to fly hundreds of miles. The swarm has been described as a “metabolic wildfire,” was a drought-related phenomenon on the Great Plains since before Euro-American settlement. They arrived like a “great white cloud, like a snowstorm, blocking out the sun.” They ate not only the grass and valuable crops, but also leather, wood, sheep’s wool, and sometimes even the clothes from people’s backs. A famous sighting in the 1870s was calculated by telegraph operators to be the size of California (described in Laura Ingall Wilder’s historical fiction novel, On the Banks of Plum Creek, 1937) bore down on Erath and Bosque Counties; it was described by Ed Nichols: ” . . . while playing in the yard one day, I noticed grasshoppers lighting on the ground. Chickens and turkeys ran out and began gobbling them up. They continued falling so fast that I ran in the back door and told mother. She looked out and hurried to close the door . . . chickens kept picking them up until they could hold no more and died . . . In two hours time there was there was not a green thing left . . . That night a hard rain fell, washing them into the branches and creeks. Numbers of stock died from drinking the water.” Since the invasions happened in August or later (there are descriptions of a swarm that was overtaken by a cold front and unable to fly, fell to the ground like hail.) switched to winter wheat, which matured in the early summer, before locust were able to migrate. The locusts became extinct by the 1890s probably because more and more prairie soils were plowed.

Ed Nichols. Ed Nichols Rode a Horse (as told by Ruby Nichols Cutbirth.) Dallas University Press and Texas Folklore Society, 1943; Jeffery Lockwood. “The Death of the Super Hopper: How Early Settlers Unwittingly Drove their Nemesis Extinct, and What it Means for us Today.” Organic Ancient (February 3, 2003); The Rocky Mountain Locust, Wikipedia.