'Nothing Stops Them': Locust Army Filmed Destroying Crops in Shocking Video

In early 2020, a locust swarm of biblical proportions swept across parts of Africa, South Asia and the Middle East, damaging hundreds of thousands of hectares of cropland. Now, mind-blowing footage of the insect surge will be shared for the first time in an upcoming docuseries on Netflix.

"The sound is just incredible," Toby Nowlan, producer of the upcoming docuseries Our Planet II, told Newsweek. "When the swarm goes over you, it's like there's a crazy roaring river over your head."

The team had originally intended to film the swarms in early 2020, but the plans were suddenly put on hold as the world was plunged into the pandemic lockdown. "COVID had just struck and we thought, How do we do this?" Nowlan said.

The team members were not deterred, however, and with the help of camera crews in Kenya, they were able to remotely direct and capture drone footage of the powerful superswarms.

"They're real explosive seasonal migrants, and their survival is contingent on moving with the food availability," Nowlan said. "Nothing's standing in their way, and they're laying generation after generation of eggs so that they can just keep following the resources."

Once travel restrictions were lifted, Nowlan and his team flew to Ethiopia to follow the swarms.

"It was just utterly spectacular and horrific for anyone standing in their way," Nowlan said. "Nothing stops them."

The team worked in close collaboration with the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), running just ahead of the insecticides that were being sprayed to control the infestation.

"The FAO obviously made a big dent in [the locusts], but the swarms were so gargantuan that nothing actually stopped them completely," Nowlan said. "Some of them were hundreds of billions strong and the size of Luxembourg, and they're covering country after country, crossing the Red Sea, crossing the Himalayas, crossing into India."

Despite the devastation caused by these insects, Nowlan described being in the middle of the swarm as "weirdly beautiful."

"They have two sets of translucent wings, and when they catch the light, they look like a snowstorm," he said.

What was less beautiful was what they left behind. "You get covered in these tiny little grassy poos," he said.

The footage is part of Netflix's latest nature docuseries, Our Planet II, narrated by David Attenborough. The series' theme is movement as it follows the migrations of animals across the planet.

"Often we focus on animal stories in one location and on a single part of their life at a single stage," Nowlan said. "But if you're telling a journey story, there are different phases to that journey."

This made the docuseries complicated to shoot.

"Often there were multiple shoots for the same animal characters so that we could stitch their whole journey story together," Nowlan said. "This is even harder than the normal sort of [nature documentary setup], especially in a world where climate change is already making it very difficult to predict migration. They are no longer quite as predictable as they once were. And then throw COVID into the mix...it was an exciting few years to get all the shoots in."

But despite the extra challenges, Nowlan said that throughout the filming he began to realize how fundamental the series' theme is to life on Earth. "Movement is just such a crucial part of the fabric of life," he said. "The health of our planet really depends on that freedom to move."

He continued: "We are suddenly making so many of those journeys really difficult. We are putting up hurdles, we're putting up barriers every time we put up a wall or a fence, and we put up blockades and nets in the ocean and in rivers and dams. These are all silent barriers to many really ancient migrations that have been happening for a lot longer than we can even imagine."

Our Planet II will be available to stream on Netflix starting Wednesday.