Locusts and Wild Honey

One of my youthful hobbies was scampering around in the
tall grass pursuing winged insects, wearing a single glove.
No, I am not borrowing from the Michael Jackson story
(so far as I know). I really did. I was trying to catch
grasshoppers.

As winged insects go, grasshoppers are fairly tame.
They may eat the vegetables in your garden, but at
least they don't bite, sting, or otherwise assault
people. Indeed, their vegetarian pacifism has won
them numerous accolades from Greenpeace, although
the grasshoppers don’t seem to care. Perhaps they
are still holding a grudge against certain members
who are pioneering “insect cuisine.” Apparently
crickets and grasshoppers are an excellent source
of protein. After you have received numerous blows
to the head from police batons, this may even begin
to sound like something you might want to try.

At any rate, grasshoppers are a good deal more fun
to catch than, say, hornets, which have a reputation
for being downright inhospitable. In the course of
grasshopper catching, I have often had occasion to
visit the ground hornets living in the fields. That
is, I always seemed to manage to stick a foot into
one of their nests. They have a very rude method of
greeting, and while bees are also less than hospitable,
at least they have the decency to produce honey. I don’t
really know what hornets do for a living, so I would
respond in kind to their overtures with an appropriate
housewarming gift. A couple of quarts of Raid usually
did the trick.

Unlike hornets, grasshoppers are fairly safe to handle.
Their defensive technique is to try to jump away, which
is half the fun of catching them. If they just sat there
and let any random passerby grab them, perhaps fewer
kids would bother. On the other hand, escargot are not
exactly known for being difficult to catch and look
how popular a menu item they are. Grasshoppers may
not be as dumb as they look, and they should be very
thankful for that.

The second defensive measure grasshoppers take comes
after you catch them and is the reason I wore the
one glove. They spit a bubble of liquid that is some
secret enzyme mix that smells putrid. The idea is that
when you smell the grasshopper's secretion, you will
no longer wish to eat him. Not that most people without
massive head trauma need extra incentive not to eat
them. They're too leggy for my taste.

A good rule of thumb is never to eat anything which has
more legs than a standard cow. I make an exception in
the case of such seafood as crab and lobster because I
don't count the claws as legs, and they also taste pretty
good. I do not make an exception for squid because,
in a word, yuck.

Once I had attained mastery of the craft of grasshopper-
catching, I yearned for more of a challenge. So I set off
to capture white tigers in the jungles of Ceylon. All right,
you caught me. Perhaps I was thinking of Ziegfried and Roy.
I really only pursued locusts.

A locust is basically a large grasshopper with better-
quality wings. Regular grasshoppers can only flutter ten
or twenty feet, but locusts can fly great distances.
Being young and foolish, I would run along after them
in hopes that one would get tired and land. I kept this
up for weeks until I finally did catch one. Then I read
in the paper that a locust swarm had descended on the
Midwest cornfields and was wreaking havoc. Scientists
couldn't figure out where they had come from. Now that
you know, don't tell anyone. I've given up locust-
chasing anyway.

These days I hunt and fish and go to Africa for big game,
and it is good. The plains are as wild and savage as the
untamed heart of the hunter. Or maybe that’s something
Hemingway wrote. My adventures were comparable. After all,
how many locusts did he catch?