The day of the Locusts...

At the end of the summer, North Africa unfortunately tends to suffer from two unavoidable scourges of nature.

One is the flash floods that occur in late August afternoons. The sky goes depressingly black. Then thunder and lightning follow soon after and finally a torrential rain which lasts no more than ten to fifteen minutes causing incredible torrents of dirty waters laden with anything that had not stowed away or been nailed down from oranges and watermelons to broken chairs and tree trunks, sometimes even cars and people.

For young children this usually turns out to be a providential playground. They will usually give chase to anything that happens to hurtle past them from fruit to broken toys. When the waters have subsided, the sky reverts to a crystal clear blue and the sun soon dries the remainder of the rain leaving trails of sand and earth.

Damage due to this customary occurrence is generally minimal unlike the other unfortunate blight that is the plague of locusts.

Individually, crickets are quite shy and often provide a lot of fun for the budding biologist. If you manage to place one in your open hand and then let go of it, the insect will spring into the air pleasantly tickling your palm.

But this harmless creature turns into a devastatingly voracious machine when in company of several thousand relatives.

I was around seven years when I first witnessed this event on our farm.

A black cloud appeared on the horizon and began moving towards our crop of wheat.
An eerie noise accompanied its progress and when it reached the outer fields, the cloud scattered hungry locusts along the width of the ripe crop.

Many hopped from one plant to the next stripping it bare while others crawled along the dry ground gathering the fallen grains.
The horde of hungry insects progressed steadily across the fields like a slow moving shadow in the afternoon sun.

For us kids, this was an ideal time for an exciting competition.

We chased and grabbed the crickets before stuffing them into empty tins we had saved for the occasion. Anyone with a cotton shirt was very lucky as the crickets tended to stick to the fibres and were just plucked and stowed in their metal prison.

Within less than an hour the fields were stripped bare and the locusts soon made their way to another fruitful harvest.
While the adults moaned and groaned about the loss of their crop, we sat under the almond tree counting our own crop.

Once counted and the winner declared, the prisoners were released to rejoin the swarm high up in the sky in search of a tasty snack.