I had no knowledge of those critters until I met up with them in Nevada. I'd been looking over the rocks in a turquoise mine dump and got down to the valley floor and decided to take a look around a loading dock someone had built there to see if anything good had fallen off the truck.
I parked my van, got out and noticed there was a light breeze, sagebrush leaves lightly rattling as I walked past a clump from the wind. The breeze stopped, but the noise kept up...
One of those Twilight Zone moments...ever conscious of proximity to nuclear test sites and having a strong background in 'B' horror flicks based on radiation induced mutations to the local fauna...I walked cautiously around that clump of sagebrush, looking for what was making the noise. It erupted with big, black bugs, 3" or so long in the body.
My first thought was "It's only three giant steps back to the van."
I took them.
On the drive out, I noticed they made a neat somewhat satisfying crunchy noise when I drove over them, and the ones not killed outright squealed...
A mere 60 miles of dirt road later, I was back at the rig, and told the guys there what had happened. They got a laugh out of it and told me those were Mormon Crickets.
