"Just their sheer abundance can make them a pretty destructive insect," said Clint Burfitt, an entomologist with the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food.
"I think you could say it's the worst-ever in Tooele County. I don't think it'd be a stretch to say that," Greenhalgh said. Tooele County sits in a valley about 30 miles west of Salt Lake City.
Arriving with the grasshoppers have been flocks of hungry seagulls keen on bite-sized grasshopper snacks.
SHOOT: Grasshoppers also make good chicken feed, if they can keep up.
"I'd call this the closest that I've seen to a plague in a long time," Halligan said.
Grasshoppers are regular summer visitors and a perennial crop-eating pest for farmers, but this year's invasion in Tooele County west of Salt Lake City is worse than anyone can remember. Tooele County commissioners have been swamped with calls about grasshoppers, particularly by people living next to undeveloped land where grasshoppers hatch — sometimes up to 2,000 per square foot.
"There's like 100 times more grasshoppers than what we're used to," said Bruce Clegg, a county commissioner whose family has lived in the area for generations.
Many of the culprits this year are clear-winged grasshoppers, which began hatching several weeks ago and have moved like an unyielding wave across the parts of the landscape ever since.
Northeast of Tooele, the grasshoppers showed up suddenly and attacked Leana Jackson's backyard garden, infiltrated her lawn and even found their way into her house and car.
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