Cricket swarm brings plague to state’s North

By Michael Mishak

Sunday, July 5, 2009 | 2 a.m.

ELKO, Nev. — Diana Bunitsky looked out the window and saw them coming.

In a scene out of Revelation, a 25-foot-wide swarm of flightless insects started to climb the stairs to Lone Mountain Station, a bar Bunitsky owns with her husband, Victor, in northern Elko County.

Diana ran for a high-pressure hose as Victor tried to distract the customers, who had come to celebrate Mother’s Day.

From the front porch she blasted the marching finger-length bugs with a stream of water, only to realize that the insects simply traveled around it — and blocked the entrance to the bar.

In seconds the bugs, known as Mormon crickets, covered the walls and windows behind her.

“It made ‘Arachnophobia’ look like a cartoon,” Diana said. “I thought, ‘Where is Steven Spielberg when you need him? I could rent this place out’ ” as a movie lot.

Inside the bar, ranchers, miners and their families stood up to get a look at the bugs.

As patrons drove up, the more courageous ones did what Bunitsky calls “the cricket two-step,” dancing over the red-and-black fanged vermin, rushing from their cars to the bar door. Others pulled up, backed out and left.

The plague lasted two weeks.

A state Agriculture Department inspector came to do what inspectors are supposed do in such cases — help. But the swarm was so thick that he refused to get out of his truck, leaving bait for the Bunitskys to dispense themselves.

“It’s like living in a horror movie,” Victor Bunitsky said. “I don’t know if God makes mistakes, but these things appear to be a mistake — a joke, at the very least.”

Destroyers of crops

The Mormon cricket is an annual pestilence in these parts. Resembling the devil spawn of a cockroach and a grasshopper, they hatch after the snow melts and devour crops as they march across the landscape. The insects have plagued the West for centuries, traveling in bands that can stretch several miles wide and cover a mile a day. As they march, they eat their dead to ensure some will finish the journey.

The pest’s name goes back to the 19th century, when a swarm of shield-backed katydids descended on newly arrived Mormon settlers in the Great Salt Lake Valley and ravaged their crops. As legend has it, a flock of seagulls delivered salvation, sweeping in to gobble up the crickets. The Mormons honored the scavenger bird with a monument outside their temple in downtown Salt Lake City.

For all the Mormon cricket’s awfulness, mankind has devised little to best the seagull.

After millions of years of evolution, we can put a robot on Mars, fire undersea missiles at satellites, map the human genome and find Saddam Hussein, but we can’t stop the Mormon cricket. We invented Twitter, thongs and cheese-crust pizza. But we can’t stop the Mormon cricket.

According to Victor Bunitsky, the crickets have no natural enemy — besides man.

“Supposedly, coyotes will eat them,” he said. “But they have to be pretty damn hungry.”

So in 2009 we battle them with a mixture of fire, despair, loud noises and heavy rolling objects. How very 10th century. The whole fight is like invading Iraq with elephants and catapults.

They get in your bed

In 2005 the crickets marched through the flyspeck town of Tuscarora, swarming houses and devouring vegetable gardens. Laura Moore, a former college professor and ceramics artist, said there were so many that the roads appeared to move.

The town’s residents — all 12 of them — fought back. They rolled up and down Weed Street, Tuscarora’s main thoroughfare, in their trucks, crushing as many as possible. It only made the problem worse. The mass of cricket corpses attracted more crickets and caused them to linger as they feasted, Moore said.

“They’re the stuff nightmares are made of,” she said. “They come under your door, through your heat ducts, into your bed and onto your pillow. It’s an unnerving, verminish kind of deal.

“You don’t know what it’s like to have crickets unless you’ve had them in your bed.”

For fun, Moore tried using a child’s BB gun to pick them off one at a time. “We’ve all made it a personal crusade to get rid of them,” she said.

Julie Parks, the town’s postmaster, did some research. A 1934 article from the Elko Free Press detailed one woman’s weapon of choice: a huge Chinese gong. According to the article, the Tuscarora woman, “taking the gong and a club, faced the army of crickets and beat hard,” confusing the insects and turning them away.

That led to a modern update: boom boxes. Townspeople tuned their stereos to the local classic rock station and cranked the volume, from dawn to dusk. It worked for a few years, Moore said. The crickets kept their distance.

This year, their luck ran out. The insects arrived just after Memorial Day and “crawled all over our boom boxes,” Moore said. The throng was so thick it took 10 days to pass through town, devouring grass and vegetable gardens along the way.

After five years battling the pests, Tuscarora is grateful for the small victories.

Year-round residents have nearly perfected cricket-proofing their houses, sealing every last screen hole and door crack. “I was thankful this year that I had 12,000 in the front yard but only 12 in the house,” Moore said.

John Rice and Lori Gilbert weren’t so fortunate. Their weekend house was infested. John found crickets in the bathtub, 2 inches deep, and used a shop-vac to capture hundreds more throughout the house. The insects had chewed holes in the curtains.

That’s not to mention the trauma inflicted on the couple’s young daughter. “They’re just creepy,” Gilbert said.

“They look like the alien from ‘Alien,’ ” Rice said, “without the telescoping jaws.”

Some in the mining-town-turned-artist-commune are resigned to the annual chaos.

“It’s a natural phenomenon,” said Ron Arthaud, a painter who settled here with his family 13 years ago. “You live here long enough and you say, ‘What am I going to do?’ You either accept it or you fight it. But you’re kidding yourself if you think you can change it.”

In prior years, he joined Moore in a bucket brigade, spreading bait throughout town — first on foot, then on an ATV. This year he said he had reached his “saturation point” and left the fighting to others. “You get used to it,” he said.

You have to plan around them

Why on earth would anyone choose to live in Mormon cricket country? Didn’t they know?

The answer, for the most part, is no. Ranchers and residents say they led a relatively cricket-free existence until five or six years ago, when, as one put it, “volcanoes of black popcorn” started erupting from the earth.

Rancher Jim Wright, who’s 82 and grew up in Ruby Valley, about 60 miles south of Elko, is one the few who remembers the insects being a problem before that. He recalled watching farmhands in the 1930s use sheet metal to herd the insects into pits and then burn them with diesel fuel.

The past few years have been particularly bad, and some residents feared a warm winter portended a cricket crop of biblical proportions. But a wet, cool spring and an aggressive control program slowed the development of the insects, said Jeff Knight, the state entomologist.

By most accounts, the crickets are more of a nuisance this year than anything else, a summer menace on six legs.

Nevertheless, the Mormon crickets have come to define and dictate life in this small swath of northern Elko County, in the northeastern corner of the state.

Take the Bunitskys.

Lone Mountain Station was supposed to be retirement, a shot-and-beer joint about 30 miles north of town, the kind of place where everybody has a tab — and everybody pays, eventually. Diana delighted in leaving a few six-packs in the mailbox for miners who would phone ahead, unable to make last call. She liked serving customers including the 81-year-old legally blind man who refused to give up driving — even after he crashed into a cow.

Life was good. Until the crickets.

Last year a cricket infestation caused them to cancel an outdoor festival designed to draw bikers from the annual Elko Motorcycle Jamboree. (The couple had booked “Blue Collar” comedian Bill Engvall.) Some bikers found the place anyway and dubbed it “the cricket bar.” T-shirts boasting of the “2008 Cricket Invasion” brought in some cash.

Fearing another swarm this year, Diana didn’t even try to organize an event.

“You live with it,” she said last month, taking a break from a sewer pipe repair, her jeans and shirt splattered with waste. “I’m losing money. We’re in an economy where every penny counts, and some of us out here are really hurting.

“I don’t think the seagulls are coming this year. We’re on our own.”

Cattle ranchers are hurting too. The crickets eat their hay and alfalfa crops. With beef prices down and feed costs up, the destruction can take a catastrophic toll on an already-thin margin.

Sam Mori, who has raised cattle for the past half century on a sprawling ranch in Deep Creek, feels the economic effects.

“If a guy doesn’t have a job, he can’t afford a steak,” he said last month, holding forth from the seat of an ATV. “His wife is going to buy the cheapest thing she can find.”

Doesn’t anyone care?

About six miles up the road from Lone Mountain Station, the Mormon crickets are on the march. Thousands of them — perhaps even millions — stream across state Route 226, a two-lane highway stretching nearly 40 miles to the small town of Tuscarora and then Deep Creek. The band of bugs is about 50 yards long. They march — and hop — from the brush onto the asphalt, stopping only occasionally to feed on their fallen brothers and sisters.

In this era of cell phone cameras and IMs, why isn’t more attention paid to these infestations?

Victor Bunitsky would like to know.

“If these crickets invaded Las Vegas, all hell would break loose,” said Bunitsky, a lawyer who runs his criminal defense practice from a corner of his bar. “The governor, the mayor, they’d all be there. But we’re one of the cow counties, so they don’t give a (expletive) about us. I’d like to pack up a crate of these bastards and send them to the governor’s office.”

Years of crickets have affected millions of acres and angered dozens of ranchers and residents. The cricket menace has the libertarian West calling for government intervention.

“We live in the Old West with satellite TV,” Diana Bunitsky said. “You’re in a neck of the woods where everybody takes care of themselves. But if you’re going to take my tax dollars, I want equal allocation.”

The state heard the call and beefed up its cricket control staff. On any given business day, from eight to 12 agricultural inspectors are trolling highways and dirt roads, responding to sightings and mapping the insects’ movements.

Inspectors Aaron Coogan and Paul Havemann travel the countryside in a pickup, hauling a pair of ATVs and bags of something called “Eco Bran,” poisonous oats designed to kill grasshoppers. They spread the bait, but much of their job is public relations.

Mori, the Deep Creek rancher, told the inspectors last month: “You guys did a hell of a job here.” He said the state’s tractor spreader and aerial spraying wiped the crickets off his ranch. “But keep your guard up,” he added, “because they can come back.”

Coogan thought he had seen all the crickets had to offer after four seasons working for the state control program. He’s seen them scale plate-glass windows and heard the stories about them eating paint off houses and chasing mice.

But they surprised him on a hot afternoon last month in Deep Creek. They were not stopped by the water. Dozens gathered on a tree branch, lined up, waiting for their turn to leap onto a telephone wire. One by one, hugging the line, they crossed the creek and advanced on a hillside.

“That’s quite an eye-opener,” Havemann said. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. They’re impressive creatures.”

Back in Tuscarora, Moore, along with a few other artists, constructed a giant burlap-and-glue cricket that greets visitors as they enter town.

For all its disdain, Tuscarora was actually celebrating the Mormon cricket this weekend. Residents dressed as crickets and marched in their annual Fourth of July parade. Moore pledged to paint the cricket sculpture red, white and blue for the occasion.

Sporting a Jagermeister T-shirt and a can of mace on a string around her neck, Moore reflected in the hot afternoon sun: “You know, we’re going to miss those crickets when they’re gone.”