Grasshoppers

Do you think about grasshoppers in the grass?

Grasshoppers!!! Oh boy, can they be tricky to photograph? One hop and they could be more than two feet away, hidden in the tall grass laughing at you. I don’t know, maybe I just spend too much time around insects.

This grasshopper happily let me photograph it. It could have hopped away at any time, but it didn’t. This made me happy.

Injured Grasshoppers

The grasshopper below can not hop away whenever it pleases. It can not communicate with other grasshoppers either.

As you can see from the first picture it is missing its hind legs. These are what a grasshopper uses to jump and to communicate. A grass trimmer was most likely the cause of the injuries, as the grass appeared to have recently been cut.

This little grasshopper was very docile and as you can see sat quite happily in my husband’s hand, occasionally wandering around. I never usually interfere with nature when I take photographs, I don’t move them to a more photogenic environment or pose them. However, in this case, we took the grasshopper and put it with some other grasshoppers, in the hope it would find a way to survive.

The casualties of neatness

The grasshopper below was in a lot worse condition than our little friend above.

You can see where its leg has been torn off. When my husband picked them up, they were so docile and didn’t move around at all. Again we found a spot near other grasshoppers that was hidden away from predators.

I see no reason why if we can help, we should not. A lot of the time it is us humans that have caused the damage. True I look back and wonder if maybe they would have been better off being put out of their misery, as it were. However, I can look back on that day, knowing that we at least tried to help.