There Is No Shortage of Hoppers

I saw a picture online last week of a friend posing with a handsome brown trout he’d caught.

“It’s hopper season!” read the caption.

I hadn’t thought about “that” hopper season in years. Instead, the hopper season I’ve become familiar with has biblical plague connotations.

The grasshoppers were so thick in north central Montana last summer that swarms of them in flight were picked up on radar. While that’s yet to happen this summer, there’s certainly no shortage. Hoppers at our cabin on Fort Peck Lake rise like clouds of dust when the dogs wander the backyard. The potted peppers I was trying to grow there were devoured in a day.

On the positive side, they also ate most of the grass, freeing me from mowing any more this summer.

There are almost as many species of grasshoppers in Montana (7) as there are flies to imitate them. A friend who farms near Circle told me three different kinds of grasshoppers ate his newly sprouted winter wheat crop to the ground.

While I’ve fished with a variety of grasshopper imitations, the Joe’s Hopper was my favorite. Named after legendary fly fisherman Joe Brooks, it closely resembled the real thing, but what made it my favorite was its durability. A friend and I used to compete to see who could catch the most fish on a single fly. The Joe’s Hopper was always our choice. It still worked when half unraveled, and unless it was lost on a back cast, a single Joe’s Hopper typically lasted all day.

The real version isn’t quite as bomb-proof. While my grandchildren were visiting us at the lake earlier this month, we armed the younger ones with fly swatters, which they wore out in a couple of days of waging war against grasshoppers. The bugs didn’t have a chance.

Folks up here are hoping they’ll soon take wing, catch a west wind, and become someone else’s problem. They aren’t as bad around Malta as they were last summer when they were so thick they denuded shelter belts and covered roadways, but there’s a lot of summer left.

At least the grouse and pheasants are well-fed.

Scrubbing dead hoppers off the grill of my truck yesterday, I wished I was floating the Yellowstone instead, casting a Joe’s to the bank where out of the depths fat rainbows rose to eat my fly.

The plague version of the same bug isn’t quite as much fun.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]