Sunday, June 28, 2020

India: Locusts Reach Outskirts of New Delhi

It's like a horror movie.
Or the American Midwest in the 19th and 20th centuries*
From PoAndPo Agrifish, June 27:
Swarms of desert locusts Saturday reached Gurugram, the outskirts of Indian capital city Delhi, locals said.
Witnesses said they watched the swarms moving in clusters in the sky outside their buildings.

Though Gurugram is a district in the adjacent state of Haryana, it forms part of Delhi's national capital region.

Many people recorded the videos of the swarms from their apartments and posted them on social media.

The clusters of desert locusts were seen covering the skyline....
....MORE

And, June 28:
Locusts enter Nepal

If they can get over the Himalayas I'm going to ask Elon Musk if he is taking passengers on the next SpaceX flight

*From Farm Progress, March 2013:
...In 1875, the largest locust swarm in history was recorded over the Midwest — 198,000 square miles. (For a size reference, California covers 163,696 square miles.) The 1875 swarm was estimated to contain several trillion locusts and probably weighed several million tons. That was the largest locust cloud in world history, according to Jeffrey Lockwood, author of “The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier.”...
And then during the depression their cousins the grasshoppers moved in:

Grasshoppers devastate Midwestern crops 
On this day in 1931, a swarm of grasshoppers descends on crops throughout the American heartland, devastating millions of acres.....