Millions of Mormon crickets blanket a Nevada city

Charles Carmichael tries not to answer work calls on Sundays. But residents of Elko, Nev., desperately need his services, as lawns, roads, and homes are covered in millions of creepy, crawling critters known as Mormon crickets.

“It’s kind of like that movie, really [The] birdsbut instead of birds, they’re crickets,” Carmichael, the owner of Battle Born Pest Control, told me. As it happens host Nil Koksal.

“I probably get six to seven calls a day. I’ve been working every night until 7:30, 8:00 at night, you know, until I just can’t anymore.”

A wave of walking insects, technically not crickets but shell-backed katydids, has descended on the city with a population of about 20,000 people. Carmichael estimates that the crickets outnumber them about “75 to one.”

The bugs earned their nickname when members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints first encountered them in the mid-1800s. Washington State University told the New York Times that they were called crickets because of their chirping.

They’re not the tiniest of critters: Carmichael estimates they’re “about the size of a grown man’s thumb…maybe Shaquille O’Neal’s thumb.”

Their large size at least means they are unlikely to enter residents’ homes through cracks in the wall. But they can still get in through crawl spaces, vents and ducts, or by piggybacking on someone’s clothing.

“They’re crawling all over you and you don’t even know they’re all over you, and you come into the house,” Carmichael said.

He said the best way to deal with them is to lure them out of houses with poisoned bait in the first place. But once they knock on your door, so to speak, there’s not much you can do but coat them with insect repellent.

Photos and videos on social media show hordes of insects obscuring highways, lawns and even walls of homes in the area. Carmichael says he’s seen the critters “jump off the walls for no apparent reason” and pounce on unsuspecting residents.

“I’ve seen kids… scream bloody murder because they’re terrified to get out of the car,” he said.

Carmichael says they are not poisonous or otherwise dangerous to humans, but they can cause serious damage to agriculture or people’s homes, lawns and gardens.

“They will certainly chew your grass to the bone,” he warned. “I’ve seen them chew paint . . . off the house’s wood siding.”

Cricket carcasses chewing on highways

Another major problem is the roads. As cars run over the unsuspecting crickets, their entrails splatter all over the sidewalk. The resulting slippery film can make it more difficult for vehicles to find traction.

And it gets worse.

“The worst thing about these crickets is that they are cannibals,” Carmichael said. “If you have hot, dead crickets on the highway, crickets are going to eat those dead bodies which then get squished. And it’s just a cascading effect.”

Nevada entomologist Jeff Knight told the Guardian that recent rainfall has made the roads even more slippery, leading to “a number of accidents caused by crickets”.

Knight added that a recent drought in the area likely caused the recent hatching, and they usually migrate to find more space.

“[Population density] is what prompts them to say, ‘There are too many of us here, we need to get moving,'” he told the Guardian.

State and federal authorities in the western US have spent millions over the years to deal with the crickets. In 2022, the Oregon legislature allocated $5 million US to establish a Mormon cricket and locust suppression program, according to The Associated Press.

Carmichael says that while the crickets go out every year, they don’t always reach cities or towns and so don’t often get the press.

He added that the Nevada Department of Agriculture and Bureau of Land Management are putting out bait to hopefully lure them away from the most populated areas of the state.

However, now that they’re involved with Elko, Carmichael says they’ll likely remain a regular fixture until August of this year, returning every summer for at least five years.

For now, Carmichael says his house has stayed out of the path of the army of bugs.

“My wife has already told me that if that happens, she won’t leave the house for nothing,” he said.

My wife can’t stand it. It irritates her about something intense.’