Cricket Blitz

This week, 93 years after a flock of sea gulls from over Great Salt Lake providentially saved Brigham Young and his Utah Mormons from crop-devouring hordes of crickets, another aerial attack is under way against these insects. On an airfield near Elko, Nev., beside two small, light, open-cockpit biplanes, loll Department of Agriculture pilots, waiting impatiently like R.A.F. pursuit pilots for reports that the enemy has been spotted.

When word comes, ground crews rush out to the planes, load them with bombing materials--a mixture of bran and sodium fluosilicate. Into the Nevada-Utah mountains the pilots fly until they see below them tumultuous marching armies of brown insects, so dense that they look like waves of molasses. Diving within 50 feet of the crags, the pilots drop their poisoned bait. The goggle-eyed, wingless crickets stop, eat, die--95% of them on warm days, 75% on cool days (when they are idler, less hungry).

If unhindered, the crickets come down from the peaks in catastrophic billions. Birds gorge on them, but more billions survive. They march over fences, over houses. They tumble into streams in writhing heaps until they establish a living bridge to the other bank. Crossing farmers' fields, they leave no leaf or kernel uneaten.

This summer's Mormon cricket threat is history's worst. The idea of aerial baiting, first offensive against the Mormon cricket, is to prevent the insects from leaving the mountain fastnesses where they breed. Total extermination of the crickets is not planned, nor is it possible. "We are not interested in what they do back in the mountains," said a bombing officer last week. "So far as we are concerned, the crickets can eat the top off of Pikes Peak if they want it."

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