This species of grasshopper was an infamous decimator of prairie farms in the 1870s. One swarm, recorded in 1875 and named after the observing physician Albert Child, was calculated to number between 3.5 and 12.5 trillion insects, encompassing some 198,000 square miles (510,000 square kilometers) of land. A western Missouri historical record remembers how they gave an earnest and overwhelming visitation, and demonstrated with an amazing rapidity that their appetite was voracious, and that everything green belong to them for their sustenance. Its taxonomic specific name (spretus) captures the human attitude toward the grasshopper, deriving from the Latin word for despised. (Entomologist Charles Valentine Riley invented a recipe for butter-fried locusts during blight, but was met with a public who would just as soon starve as eat those horrible creatures.) The swarms, described by one farmer as like a great white cloud, like a snowstorm, blocking out the sun like vapor, became a rare site in the twentieth century, due, it is thought, to the expansion and irrigation of farmland and trampling of breeding grounds by livestock. As extinction ripples up and down the animal kingdom, the Eskimo curlew's critical endangerment (or possible extinction) is thought to stem from the loss of this vital food source. The locust was formally declared extinct in 2014. Laura Ingalls Wilder's On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937) captures the awesome force of these lost locust swarms.