In the late 1930s, during the depths of The Great Depression and on the eve of a second world war, Colorado faced off against a domestic invader whose hordes reached biblical proportions.

The scenes conjured up by news reports and legend are equal parts monster sci-fi and apocalyptic slapstick:

National Guard soldiers armed with flame-throwers, hanging from slow-moving train cars to cut a blazing swath through grasshopper swarms so dense they could block the sun.

Troops of turkeys herded en masse across acres of crops, devouring ‘hoppers ‘til they grew fat and bug-drunk.

“My granddad certainly didn’t want to eat any of those turkeys,” said Chuck Hanagan, the scion who now runs Hanagan Farms near Swink, recalling the tales his grandfather told about working the family land during an infamous infestation of yore.

Hanagan now has his own grasshopper lore to pass down, as the worst infestation in memory continues to flit and gorge its way through the best of eastern Colorado’s greenery.

“It’s not as bad now as it was in June, but we were to a point where you couldn’t walk out into the field and find either a sorghum plant or a millet plant where some of the leaves didn’t show ‘hopper damage,” Hanagan said. “There were so many, the ground just moved with them.”

As plagues go, a scourge with a potential cartoon mascot and counterattacks that verge on comic relief might seem like a lesser kind of evil.

But grasshoppers were — and are — no laughing matter for those who turn to crops for salary, sustenance, or simply the zen of horticulture.

“It can be heartbreaking when you spend all this time and energy, not to mention the money, trying to make your plants thrive, and then grasshoppers come in and destroy it and you have to start over,” said Todd Hegert, board secretary for the Charmaine Nymann Community Garden at Bear Creek Park in Colorado Springs. “But that’s part of what we do here, too, is support one another through those setbacks.”

The spring and summer-so-far have been the worst grasshopper year at the community garden, according to members who’ve tilled its earth for decades, Hegert said Thursday, as he led a tour of the devastation and the occasional success stories.

Every step through the 2.25-acre grid of garden plots cued a broadside of bio-popcorn, the smack of exoskeleton on thigh, leaf, ground.

The serenity of Joy Miller’s morning ritual at the garden, and her smile, were briefly interrupted by queries about the air- and groundborne attack she and her neighbors are currently battling.

“Around here,” said Miller, “‘grasshopper’ is a curse word.”

Weather is the main driver of an infestation that, while it may not be one for the record books, has sent farmers and gardeners scrambling to save plants and kept extension office phone lines busy, said Lisa Mason, a horticulture specialist and entomologist with Colorado State University Extension.

Colorado is home to more than 100 species of grasshoppers, a vast majority of which are host-specific — meaning they feed only on certain, or certain parts of, plants — and cause little “noticeable damage,” Mason said. The handful of species that are generalist feeders, devouring “basically anything above ground,” are the culprits.

Grasshoppers lay their eggs in late summer or early fall and hatch when temperatures grow warm enough. An unusually early, hot spring — with some of the warmest temperatures on record for June in Colorado — led to an early hatch. Hordes of ravenous young ‘hoppers emerged just as fledgling plants were getting started.

“Once those crops are established, they’re a few feet high, they’re more hearty and can survive,” Hanagan said. “But if there are just a few leaves, and they eat those, it won’t make it. And that’s what we’re seeing this year.”

The grasshopper season of 2024 may be the worst in modern times, but it pales in comparison to historic infestations.

One estimate put the number of grasshoppers swarming the country’s Plains and Midwest in 1875 at 12.5 trillion, the “greatest concentration of animals ever speculatively guessed,” according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

The infestation in June 1937 was so bad in Colorado Springs that the nation’s senior entomologist visited the city, reportedly threw his hat on the ground, and was “amazed to count 247 ‘hoppers” trapped beneath when he lifted up the chapeau, according to a 2014 story by Army National Guard Maj. Adam Morgan on the Colorado National Guard website.

The Colorado governor declared a state of emergency, calling in the Guard to assist in countermeasures that included “flame throwers, ‘hopper dozers and ‘hopper electrocuting devices,” as reported in a Feb. 20, 1938, story in the Sunday Gazette and Telegraph. The spreading of poisoned bait, however, proved “better in most instances,” according to the story, which reflected on the previous year’s destruction and counseled farmers on how to prepare for what was to come — a hatch with “the makings of a plague of grasshoppers such as this country has never seen.”

The story recommended “farmers and stockmen” get a jump on the hatch by finding and destroying egg beds, and prepare for the battle to come by spending $15-$50 to build a DIY bait spreader on the back of an old automobile.

“Lack of enough of the spreaders, which do the work of 20 men and do it more safely, was the most serious handicap in the ‘hopper control drive of 1937,” proclaimed the story.

Grasshopper infestations are hardest to manage in areas where cultivation borders open lands, where there’s always a new swarm waiting to move in once the resident population is dispatched.

Such conditions define much of Hanagan’s farm, so he said he reluctantly had to turn to an aerial application of pesticide sprays to save his crops.

“You can see a big difference for probably 10 days, then they move back in,” he said. “But my plants are higher now, above waist high, so less susceptible to that damage.”

In addition to lost crops and delayed harvests, the cost to spray pesticides, and save his plants from grasshoppers, has increased by almost 150% in the past two years, he said.

“Every cost that the American farmer has, has gone up,” said Hanagan, president of the Colorado Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association. “But Mother Nature deals us the most devastating blows.”

Pesticides aren’t allowed at the Charmaine Nymann Community Garden, so gardeners have turned to a number of natural remedies and other tactics.

“What’s the most maddening about it is that grasshoppers are random. They’ll eat one plant, leave another alone, then move to the next plot and do the opposite,” Hegert said. “It’s really tough to find an organic way to fight them everywhere without harming the other good creatures you want and need in the garden.”

The best and most successful recourse is to cover plants with landscape netting, creating a barrier that keeps grasshoppers out but allows in sunlight and water, Hegert said.

Organic pest repellents, including sprays of garlic solutions and pepper oils, even cinnamon, have worked for some gardeners, but success requires diligence, and “again, it’s random what attracts or deters grasshoppers in one place, and doesn’t in another,” he said.

But defenses have been raised, and with everyone on high alert, many plots here have started to rally. Gardeners and the community garden board are doing everything they can to try to keep it that way.

A mowed path around the two sides of the garden that border grassy open space is hopefully slowing the in-migration of new populations, Hegert said, but piles of birdseed and birdbaths installed to lure more ‘hopper predators to the garden haven’t made much of a dent. 

“A lot of our members have mentioned how there aren’t as many birds, or butterflies, this year …” Hegert said. “Just a whole lot of (expletive) grasshoppers.”