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A woman was disgusted when her car was engulfed by a swarm of "hundreds of thousands" of grasshoppers that splatted against her windshield, as shown in a grim video.
Maryke Steenkamp, 20, was driving with her family in South Africa on January 5 when the skies turned dark with flying bugs near the town of Colesberg.
In the footage recorded in the car, she is wincing and squirming as hundreds of bugs are squished into the glass with deafening bangs like gunfire.
"Oh my god," she gasps as the green and yellow bodies turn to mush on the windshield.
Maryke recalls the smell of the squished bugs was "awful" and she and her family had to pull over and wipe them off the glass because they were blocking the view.
She said: "Even though there was a windshield between the grasshoppers and me, my body instinct told me they were going to hit me in the face so I kept dodging.
"We had to slow down when they started hitting the windshield. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, the smell of those dead grasshoppers was awful.
"The grasshoppers must have been relocating for days because we drove past a few dead ones on the road and my nephew drove back the next day and he saw a helicopter spraying them with poison because they damage crops like corn, wheat, and sorghum.
"I didn't realise at first that they were grasshoppers because I have never seen something like this before in my life. I honestly thought it was butterflies at first.
"We stopped at the nearest petrol station so we could clean the windshield and check the car's radiator because we were scared it might be blocked but luckily it wasn't."
Locusts have been an ongoing problem in South Africa due to unusually prolonged rains providing enough food for continual breeding.
The South African National Department of Agriculture said that fighting the bugs, including purchasing insecticides and training pest-controllers, has already cost it more than R74,6m (£3.4million).
- In the News
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