Just a quick Friday experience to show you in here.
What I mean is that he only had one leg.
It is a locust and reckoned as a pest by farmers, as swarms of them can make a land with crops disappear in a few hours. The swarms number thousands, and when they fly over roads, they present a real danger to motorists. A dense swarm, that is a big cloud size, simply descends upon the lands and they attack the crops right down to stub size.
They have certainly earned their pest reputation, and you will be amazed to see what Wikipedia has to say about them.
Aristotle studied locusts and their breeding habits and Livy recorded a devastating plague in Capua in 203 BC. He mentioned human epidemics following locust plagues which he associated with the stench from the putrifying corpses; the linking of human disease outbreaks to locust plagues was widespread. A pestilence in the northwestern provinces of China in 311 AD that killed 98% of the population locally was blamed on locusts and may have been caused by an increase in numbers of rats (and their fleas) that devoured the locust carcasses.
We almost tramped on him, as he sat on the floor planks of a walkway, and look, he only had one leg.
So, I picked him up to give you a clear view of this bugger.
I balanced him on the tips of my fingers, so that he did not have a chance to find an anchor for his one jumping leg in order to fly away.
But then he calmed down, as he sensed no danger to his survival.
But like I said in the title, he was done for and without food he will not last long. They don't eat the plants where I put him to die in peace.
People also eat locusts in Africa and Asia, as they regard them as delicacies and a good protein source. But of course, we don't. If you read the source, at the intro, then I bet you will be just as surprised as I was about the danger presented by these locusts. Locust plagues exist since ancient times, and it caused thousands of human deaths due to starvation as all the lands were stripped from crops. Amazingly, to this day, we still see locust plagues around, albeit on a smaller scale, here in South Africa. We now have modern pest controllers, like planes spraying pesticides on the lands that the locusts are busy eating. And so, it only appears occasionally in suitable conditions for them to emerge like a cloud of doom.
Such is life.
I hope you enjoyed the pictures and the story.
Photos by Zac Smith. All-Rights-Reserved.
Camera: Canon PowershotSX70HS Bridge camera.
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