It is just a big grasshopper who overwintered and likely is out looking for (a) food and (b) a mate. Grasshopper outbreaks usually are a summertime issue, not a spring one. Their population generally only rises to a damaging level in the home landscape and garden when the population in the rangeland runs out of green plants to eat in hot weather and they begin migrating to irrigated landscapes and vegetable gardens.

I'm seeing only large grasshoppers (and more than usual for this early) and large crickets, but not small ones. I actually consider that a good sign at this point. Often, by now, I'm seeing tons of small ones and I've only seen one small one in the garden this year. My indicator plants in the garden are lemon balm and catnip. When the grasshopper nymph population starts hitting those two plants hard in spring, that's when I buy Semaspore bait and put it out in the years that I even use it at all. So far, there's not a single hole in a leaf of any of the lemon balm or catnip plants. My personal threshold for buying Semaspore and using it is when I'm seeing roughly 8 to 10 2nd and 3rd instar grasshoppers per square yard in the pastures, which roughly correlates to when I am seeing the holes in the plants in the garden. Actually, I probably start thinking about using Semaspore when I am seeing about that many first instar hopper nymphs, so then I order it and by the time I receive it, they're already the size of 2nd to 3rd instars (so if I order it when I'm seeing 1/8" to 1/4" long hoppers, they usually are 1/4 to 1/2 or ever 3/4 inches long by the time I'm spreading it).

Seeing many nymphs in spring doesn't even necessarily correlate to a big summer outbreak. Sometimes a lot of them die and the dreaded summer outbreak doesn't happen. I'm out in the country, though, so I never consider high nymph populations a good thing.

I haven't even seen the 2016 APHIS Grasshopper Hazard map yet so I haven't given the hoppers much thought, but if you look at the 2015 hazard map, you can see that portions of west Texas were expecting a high population last summer, which could be an important indicator for us. I know that some areas of west Texas had a high grasshopper population last summer, but I'm not sure how widespread it was. I didn't have a grasshopper problem in my yard or garden last year, but in 2013 and 2014 they were awful.

Here's the 2015 grasshopper rangeland hazards map:

2015 Grasshopper Hazards Map

It is the orange and red areas on the map that indicate high enough levels to worry about.