Southern Alberta landowners seeing spike in grasshopper population

Richelle Stirling lives on an acreage near Champion, Alta. This year, she’s been dealing with a pest destroying her young trees.

“They’ve stripped the leaves off of all of my Caraganas, and they were moving into — and they’ve killed — some of my baby poplars I’m trying to grow, and all my shelter belt stuff they’ve been damaging,” said Sterling.

Grasshoppers are the culprit. In just a few days, the little insects did some serious damage to her yard.

“Over a weekend they had stripped my Caraganas.

“When there is that many, they can do a lot of damage very, very quickly,” she added

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "When there is that many, they can do a lot of damage very, very quickly," she added

Dan Johnson is a professor at the University of Lethbridge in Geography and Environment. He has been studying grasshoppers for close to 40 years and monitors their activity closely. He said some pockets of the province are seeing a rise in the number of insects.

0:31 Video captures swarm of grasshoppers at Las Vegas parking lot

“From Lethbridge, down to the U.S. border, maybe Milk River, that zone over to Foremost, Skiff, towns like that, they’ve had a problem for about three years, and it’s been growing and it’s a particular species, and it’s not the same species as outbreaks in the past,” added Johnson.

He developed a book called Grasshopper Identification & Control Methods to protect crops and the environment. It helps identify which species you may have on your property, how to determine what they could be feeding on and what type of pesticide will help control the problem.

“We are almost repeating a cycle we saw in the 1980s and the early 2000s in which they began in small hot spots in a zone that has the right weather,” said Johnson.

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "We are almost repeating a cycle we saw in the 1980s and the early 2000s in which they began in small hot spots in a zone that has the right weather," said Johnson.

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Alberta has nearly 80 different species of grasshoppers and about 10 of those can be problematic. Johnson says certain kinds thrive in different conditions.

“Some of them do well in moist conditions, some of them do well in hot and dry, some of them feed only on the grasses and the barley, others feed on broad leaf plants,” he added.

Stirling said spraying the grasshoppers seems to have helped and hopes she can keep them at bay.

“We’ll just keep an eye out for the summer and wait for next spring.”