Spotted Bird Grasshopper

About the Spotted Bird Grasshopper

The Spotted Bird Grasshopper is one of the big bruisers of the Texas grasshopper world -- a heavy-bodied Schistocerca that earns the "bird" in its name by flying like one, launching on long, strong flights when flushed instead of the short hop most grasshoppers manage. Follow one through the binoculars and it may sail forty yards and land in a shrub like a sparrow.

It is a handsome insect on close inspection: olive to brown with a pale racing stripe down the back, cream-spotted forewings, and boldly ringed hind legs. The genus is famous company -- Schistocerca includes the true locusts of history -- though this species minds its manners and lives as an ordinary, if oversized, brushland grasshopper.

Adults peak in late summer and fall, when every walk through Texas brush flushes a few, and they are a staple menu item for the kestrels, roadrunners, and shrikes that stake out the same fields.

This one was photographed on September 10, 2026 at Hornsby Bend, part of the same macro walk that produced the harvester ants and the lynx spider -- proof that a hundred yards of ordinary Texas brush is a full day of subjects if you slow down enough to look.