West by Southwest Ernie Bulow

DOES YOUR LUNCH MAKE NOISE?

JUST BE SURE IT DOESN’T BITE!

CICADAS COME IN A VARIETY OF COLORS????

t is true that pretty much every group in the world eats

Ibugs—or used to. They are considered a delicacy in many cultures. There has been a lot of natter on television about this being the year of the cicada—that they only come out once every seventeen years. That’s what they say.

Given that local Natives traditionally enjoyed them, that seems like a rather long time to wait between snacks.

Many years ago I was in Prescott, Arizona, during a huge swarm. The noise made by millions of cicadas actually hurts. They seemed to have gathered around the courthouse for some reason. That screeching really is painful to the ear.

I knew that most Southwestern tribes used to eat the noisy little buggers and Prescott gave me the push to do some not particularly scientific research. For the record, cicadas are burrowing bugs that can grow three inches long.

A Zuni friend of mine told me her grandma would have her pick them up when they appeared. The method was pretty simple—find their holes, stick a large blade of grass down there and pull out a snack. The simplest way to prepare them was just to toast them in a frying pan. Still doesn’t seem like seventeen years passes between snacks.

No, they are not called keekeedahs.

I used to be something of an authority on mountain men, even dressing in skins and camping out. All strictly traditional. So I knew about the adventures of Jedediah Smith, first man to enter the Great Basin, 1826. That includes most of Nevada and parts of neighboring states. No rivers run out of that territory. Native tribes in the Basin are mostly of Shoshone stock—Paiute, Goshute, etc. These days they all go by Shoshoni.

It seemed out of character for Smith to disdainfully call the Shoshoni, Diggers.

Hey, roots are good. Then, for years, people tried to figure out which group he was referring to. It is true they didn’t wear much body covering (nice way of saying naked). They had little material culture or housing like other tribes. But it was their diet that drew his greatest disdain. Jed Smith told the world they ate grasshopper stew. They also ate tons—literally—of pinion seeds. The Nevada pine nut is much larger than the local variety.

Somehow “grasshopper stew” became the catch phrase for things primitive, with obvious negativity. Actually quite a number of folks eat grasshoppers. People treat locusts and grasshoppers as two different things, though they are the same bug. When the per-acre density of crickets or grasshoppers passes a certain point they morph, and grasshoppers turn into locusts that really chow down. I swear locusts have bigger teeth.

According to the Mormons they are a great delicacy for seagulls. I don’t know about crickets, but I have seen one of those birds (in a hayfield) swallow mice until it was unable to fly.

There is a cricket called the Mormon cricket and it is distinctly colored. Weirdly, these are katydids and not true crickets. Are they only found in Utah?

In 1848 a huge swarm of them stripped the valley of vegetation

Ernie Bulow

and the Lord sent seagulls to their aid.

Turns out crickets also swarm, mainly because they are all cannibals and they have to keep moving not to be eaten by their own kind.

When I was fifteen I loved camping, but one night I had a bed partner. I slept soundly at that age, so when I woke up I was amazed to find that one of my feet hurt like the devil and was so badly swollen I couldn’t put my boot on. I counted more than a dozen burning sores on the one foot. At the bottom of the bag I found a bald-headed insect. My grandpa said it was called a sand spider—though it’s not in the spider family. I read once that there were more than 100 species of this bug.

That seems like overkill to me. Hopis revere this critter.

It turns out that none of the names for this nasty looking critter actually fit. Like where did “potato bug “come from? To me that was the little armored guy who rolled up in a ball. How about sand cricket? Skull cricket? The common name in English is Jerusalem cricket, though it is not a cricket and never travelled to Jerusalem. The

Jerusalem variety—the only one wingless in this group of bugs—do scream though. Why do all these bugs make noise?

The so-called scream is caused by rubbing their legs together— undoubtedly where the cricket thing came from. However, crickets make their sounds with their wings, or rubbing their legs on their wings. The Jerusalem cricket has no wings. Doesn’t come anywhere near the sound of cicadas, probably because there aren’t as many. They can also make noise by pounding their abdomen on the ground.

Now that crickets have come to mind I have to say they are also eaten. It turns out that ants are high in iron. If you get past the squeamishness almost all bugs can be eaten, though I’m not a big fan of grubs and worms. But worms are in the diets of an estimated two billion people.

Little known fact: there is a power bar for amateur athletes that is made of powdered crickets—for sale in a variety of recipes.

So if we get a mess of cicadas this summer, I’m definitely going to try them.

WEST BY SOUTHWEST

GRASSHOPPERS COME IN AN ARRAY OF COLORS AND DESIGNS

MORMON CRICKET