Mormon crickets found in Clark County

CLARK COUNTY, Idaho (KIFI) - Bonnie Stoddard has lived her entire life in Dubois.

She's seen multiple rounds of Mormon crickets out and around the county.

After the local rodeo last weekend, she decided to go on the hunt to find them.

She said, "I took my friends that are visiting here from California, and we drove out to see them and we found them and they were they had taken over the main road, A2."

A2 is the county road that goes between Dubois and Island Park.

Bonnie found the massive group just 10 miles to the east of Dubois.

"This is something that comes back about every seven years. And there's a couple of places out here east of dubois and where you can usually check and there'll be a few crickets around.  but this is the most i've seen since we had the big infestation."

An infestation in the town itself happened back in the 1930's. The Mormon crickets were everywhere.

"One of the fellows, ray moore, had his old pickup and he was going back and forth, back and forth across the road. He was trying to kill all of em good. Then there was so many of them. You couldn't. You couldn't begin to kill them."

"They had come across quite a bit of our hay ground. And then when they crickets came across in the ground, they just eat everything down to the bare dirt. And so part of our hate crop was gone because of the crickets. And it just devastated the country."

Authorities at that time tried to kill the Mormon crickets with poison sawdust.

It worked, but unfortunately, it also killed many cattle that mistakenly ate it too.

That will be the problem moving forward with the crickets that are out today.