The Old Testament says that of the ten Egyptian plagues that God subjected Pharaoh, the eighth (most cruel) was the locust. This happened in 1300 BC. during the reign of the pharaohs from the IX dynasty.
“Then the Lord said to Moses: Stretch out your hand on the land of Egypt, and let the locusts attack the land of Egypt and eat all the grass of the earth (and all the fruits of the tree), everything that survived the hail …
Morning came, and an east wind hit the locusts.
And the locusts attacked all the land of Egypt and lay down throughout all the land of Egypt in great numbers: before there had been such locusts … She covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was not visible, and ate all the grass of the earth and all the fruit of the trees that had survived the hail and there was no greenery left on the trees or on the grass of the field in all the land of Egypt."
Historical chronicles brought to us descriptions of the death of once prosperous countries and the extinction of entire peoples. So, in 125 BC. locusts destroyed all crops in Numidia and Cyrenaica, and the subsequent famine claimed 800,000 lives. In March-April 944, huge clouds of locusts appeared in the sky over Baghdad, which blocked the sun. She destroyed everything that could be destroyed. After that, hunger and terrible diseases began.
Nowadays, in some African countries, at railway stations (for example, on the Johannesburg-Harare section of the route), an announcement is often heard: “There will probably be no train today. A huge flock of locusts is moving across the path. And this warning is not superfluous. After all, if the train on the rise collides with her, then trouble is inevitable. The road in the direction of Zimbabwe goes up in some places, the locomotive crushes insects, starts to slip, and the whole train slides downhill.
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Most often, it is not the adult locust that migrates from the Kalahari Desert to the Limpopo River, but its jumping wingless larvae - locusts. Even the full-flowing Limpopo cannot stop their marching squads (bands), because they move in a continuous stream in the form of a tape stretching for several kilometers.
If millions of insects simultaneously jump into the water, then it will immediately boil from their invasion. The first locusts, of course, will choke, but others jump over their bodies (as if on a pontoon bridge) and move to the opposite shore. In less than an hour, the trees in the river floodplain will crackle under the weight of insects that have settled on them.
Local people from the Bamangwato tribe in one of the dry years did not even plant seeds in the incinerated soil. Therefore, they did not fear that the gluttonous locusts would destroy the crop. Most likely, they could even rejoice at their invasion. All the villagers - from young to old - caught the larvae and sent them into their mouths, after having torn off their heads, legs and wing buds.
They even made supplies: they stuffed huge bags with insects in which corn is usually transported. Sun-dried (or even fried in oil) locusts are a local delicacy.
Of course, in all this one can see "African savagery". But after all, locusts and grasshoppers are the very "akrids" of the ancient Greeks, they are the food of John the Baptist, St. Anthony and many other righteous men. The famous “father of history” Herodotus cited the recipes for the locust “diet” in his writings.
However, a catastrophic plague of locusts has dire consequences. Moreover, distances for this traveler are not an obstacle. Having grown wings, with a favorable wind, it can fly at a speed of 40 kilometers per hour. There are known cases when flocks flew out of Morocco in the morning and landed in Portugal for the night. "Teeth of the wind" - as the Africans themselves call flying swarms of locusts.
Flying swarms of locusts are a swarming mess, up to 25-30 centimeters thick. If there are bushes at the side of the road, then their outlines can only be guessed, since they are completely covered with large insects the size of an index finger. Until the sun begins to bake, the whole mass is in a drowsy daze.
But as soon as it gets a little hotter, everything around will stir and rustle. Pushing each other apart, each individual insect seeks to get out into the sun - to warm up, spread its wings and set off. The earth at this time is a swirling tornado - here and there swarms of locusts fly up.
Pilots participating in the fight against its invasions say that due to the noise of flying locusts, they often do not hear the noise of their aircraft engine. From her, in broad daylight, real darkness often sets in, and after the flight of the flock, a completely terrible picture appears: where there was life yesterday, dead red earth stretches.
Half-gnawed branches stick out from it, and only with difficulty one can guess that just a few hours ago, for example, a cotton or corn field was green here. Not a single leaf, not a single fresh shoot remained. Banana and mango trees broke off under the weight of the flocks that slept on them. Even the grass has disappeared.
Scientists say that the average flock of two billion individuals covers about twelve square kilometers and weighs three thousand tons (2.5 tons per hectare). Such a flock devours four thousand tons of green mass per day. This amount of food would be enough to feed one million people (or 40,000 elephants, or 100,000 camels) in one day.
Landing once in the citrus region of Morocco, the locusts destroyed sixty tons of oranges in one hour. Therefore, Africans also call it "a cloud of flying hunger."
In the 1940s, there was an unprecedented invasion of locusts on the African continent. Suddenly the sun was gone, and a cloud descended from the darkened sky, living and monstrous. She fell on the fields and, like a wide stream, slowly crept, leaving a dead space behind. “And we realized that hunger had come again,” recalled one old-timer who survived it. Its raids in 1949 led to the death of thousands of people from hunger and caused material damage in the tens of millions of dollars.
After the invasion of such a cloud in 1958, millions of people in Ethiopia were on the verge of starvation. And although there were tropical rains at that time, they were not always and everywhere expected with joy. The soil swollen from moisture is a fertile environment for the development of acrid.
It was relatively calm back in August 1977, but with the beginning of the rainy season (in September) - in the countries adjacent to the Red Sea, locusts began to multiply at an unprecedented rate. Even the most modern means of destruction could not stop it.