Year of the Plague (and I don't mean Covid-19)

A wall of our shed

 

The summer of 2021 will go down in memory for us as creepy, disgusting and gross.  Well – primarily June.  Still waiting on the rest.

 Our area was totally infested with gypsy moth caterpillars – which I had heard of before but never truly experienced. 

Last year (2020) there had been some progress of them up one side of our lake, but we are at the north end, and here they were not too bad.  That said, we were a tad grossed out last year too when the small bits that we were blowing off the front deck turned out to be “frass” which is lingo for caterpillar poop.  We ended up taking down the tree that they had decided to live on (for a variety of reasons) and ultimately our front deck was poopless.

Fast forward to 2021.  The damned things were EVERYWHERE !! 

They start out very small and go through something like 5 or 6 moultings where they shed their outer layers.  They end up about 3 cm long.  An individual caterpillar is sort of attractive in a fuzzy sort of way, but thousands of the beasties are just creepy.  They were falling out of the trees on us, and off the eaves, and pirouetting on gossamer strands as they moved with the wind.

I did not take this, but this is what they look like

The frass kept falling, along with leaf cuttings as they ate their way through our forest canopy.  The falling leaf cuttings, frass and maybe the actual caterpillars ended up sounding like a light rain – particularly noticeable at night.  Just plain strange.

The caterpillars eat away the leaves of the trees

Oddly they devour some species of trees but not others

Gypsy Moths (apparently the name is not PC so a name change is in the offing) have an interesting history here.  These guys actually did escape from a lab ! (maybe like the other plague?)  Apparently back in 1868/1869  a scientist/entrepreneur thought they might be able to establish a silk industry in NE USA by mating a gypsy moth (imported from Europe) with a silk worm.  The experiment was a bust but more importantly the damned things got loose and now roam around North America creating havoc.

By early July they were pretty much gone, off cocooning.  All we are seeing is brown moths flitting about.  The brown ones are males.  The ladies just sit on a tree somewhere and wait for the men to show up.  I am sure there is a lesson there somewhere.  We hear that a typical cycle is around 3 years.  I am thinking we are on year 2.  Outlook for next year is much better - partly because it hopefully could not get much worse, but more importantly I did go around to a huge number of trees to scrape off egg sacs, and found very few.

The standard DIY defense around here is wrapping the tree trunk with either burlap or duct tape – something to be a bit of a physical barrier.  My understanding is that for a stand-alone tree this works fairly well.  However – we have a pretty big place – and the canopy touches over all of it.  So – they can easily go from treetop to treetop.  Aerial spraying programs can work, but of course have their own issues - including a very short season that it is effective.

We are told that the deciduous trees should re-leaf, and we are seeing just that.  Coniferous ones have a harder time, but ours is a deciduous forest.  Thank goodness for new leaves.

So as for those stones to the outdoor shower that were blackened with the caterpillar stuff after a rain??  Well, scrubbing with soap and water did not remove it.  Neither did a pressure washer.  Neither did an intense automotive grease type cleaner.  The Pink Stuff sort of worked but I did not have enough.  The winner was bleach.  

All because a lab experiment went amiss.  Geez.

 

Quite the mess

The paper towels kept the bleach from running off

Ta Da