What are chinch bugs and why are they devouring Calgary lawns?

Wednesday's afternoon storm might help give your lawn a boost, unless you're afflicted with a tiny pest that spends its days eating your grass and destroying yo

They’re small and hard to spot, but the damage chinch bugs are doing to Calgary lawns is unmistakable.

James Szojka owns the lawn company Yard Dawgs, and says the 2024 water restrictions placed on Calgarians didn’t help matters.

“We are seeing more this year than all the other years combined,” he said. “I think the damage, especially in the southeast communities of Mahogany, Auburn Bay, McKenzie Towne, all these areas in particular – because chinch bugs migrate from the south – do get hit first and they get hit the hardest.”

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The bugs target individual blades of grass and suck the nutrients out of them, leaving them brown.

Over time, a lawn will have a series of brown spots, and if left unchecked, they’ll devour the entire lawn.

“They inject a toxin, and it will cause damages up to the point where someone has to completely replace their lawn,” he said. “This is perfect environment for the bugs to really start to get very active and start to damage, because they love hot and dry, they do not like cold and wet.”

Szojka says chinch bugs migrate to other lawns by flying or walking and won’t discriminate.

It’s something causing concern for Calgary homeowner Tamara Schuetzle.

She says her lawn is green and lush right now, and she’s working hard to keep it that way.

“By removing the thatch, aerating so it’s not compacted, and then of course nutrients,” she said. “Calgary has a lot of clay, so I kind of use a combination of things that breaks up the clay so that the grass can have a better root system.”

She’s watering frequently to make her lawn less appealing to chinch bugs, which have devastated her neighbour’s yard.

“The problem is, yes my lawn looks green now,” she said. “But if everybody doesn’t take care and do their part, they’re just going to keep coming back, so it needs to be like a community thing where we do it together.”

University of Calgary insect physiologist Jackie Lebenzon studies insects, how they work and how they respond to changes in different types of environments.

She says Calgary’s northern climate restricts the species that can live here, but chinch bugs have grown hardy and can survive winters easily.

“They’re totally built to last.” she said. “They do go away, they go dormant and they disappear (for close to six months of the year), so I guess there’s two things they could do: run away, a lot of them migrate south just like a lot of us wish we could do, and then a lot of them just hunker down and stay here and enter a hibernation like state.”

Lebenzon says Calgarians have a love-hate relationship with bugs, but there’s likely more people that hate them in their yards, especially wasps, ants and aphids.

“Last year, people were like, ‘There’s so many wasps everywhere,” she said. “I think it’s because we had a really wet spring, which means there’s lots of aphids 00 and wasps like to eat the aphid dew, which is basically like aphid poop – and so because of that, their population can maybe grow a little bit larger than what you might have seen the year before."

Lebenzon says insects are an important part of our ecosystem.

“Insects make up three-quarters of all animals that live on land,” she said. “They pollinate about three quarters of all the food that we eat, like all the types of plants and so you know like it or not, they’re very important.”