English
25 April 2009
I just read an article in The Wall Street Journal about the small town of Tuscarora, Nevada. I mean really small town—there are only thirteen residents there. (It began as a gold-mining town; by 1878 around 5000 people lived there, but since 1900, when the ore was exhausted, the population has dwindled.)
The town especially has a problem with yearly invasions of two-inch crickets. This year they’re going to combat them by taking all their boom boxes outside, tuning to a hard rock station and turning up the volume. If even that doesn’t repel the crickets they’re going to go one step further with lawn mowers and string trimmers.
Oh, and in the summer, they actually get the resident count up to twenty.
28 April 2009
Hey Micah, you didn’t describe just how bad those crickets get. No wonder its a ghost town. The wingless crickets form thickly crawling swarms about 2 mile long and 1 wide. They will eat any vegetation in their path. Sometimes dead crickets form a slick on the road that snowplows need to scrape off because cars start slipping. There are too many to poison effectively.