Tent Worms

These tent caterpillars are real pests this year.   They've done a number on our fruit trees and then they moved on into the veg garden.   They love the strawberries and I've been picking them off for weeks.  

The chickens hate them.   The ducks hate them.   Which means we have to kill them ourselves.   I've squished thousands of these this year - everywhere - on the road, on the trees, in the gardens, everywhere.  Eew.

Eew.     Seriously eew.

Tent Caterpillars Revisited

Remember the tent caterpillars I talked about a couple of weeks ago?   Kind of eww, kind of cool.


We've got rather a lot of them this year.  They've emerged from their tents and are eating everything in their path.    These guys are on a chokecherry tree. 

All that was left were a few blooms on the tips of the branches.  The caterpillars had eaten every leaf.   Look at the pic above again.   See what I mean?

Then they dropped to the ground where they gathered by the hundreds [at least] on the multiflora roses.   The roses are pests, too and heaven knows there's enough of them to share, but it's still kind of eww to see that many munching crunching caterpillars all over them.

You can hear the munching and crunching. [shudder]  At which point the eww factor far exceeds the cool factor. 

Tent Caterpillars

We get these every year at this time.  I think they're equally really cool and really gross.

I'd heard them called bagworms, but they're not actually bagworms. 

They're tent caterpillars, Malacosoma americana. They especially like our choke cherry trees - and there are tents in every one of them.  They grow up to be moths.  Here are a bunch of pics of the adult moth.

I think they're pretty with the sun shining through the tents.  At least until they get full of frass [poop].  Then it's just disgusting.