by Leslie Cox; Thursday, June 14, 2013
Honestly, tent caterpillars do not kill trees BUT they can sure chew plants up pretty badly.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog, we have the forest tent caterpillars (Malacosoma disstria) in our garden. There are a few northern tents (Malacosoma californicum pluviale) in the neighbourhood but we have not seen any in our garden. Hence the problem.
Forest tent caterpillars do not make tents so you do not usually spot them until they start to move out of their “nursery tree” in search of more food. Unless you notice lots of bits of chewed off birch leaves on top of the soil in your vegetable garden as we did earlier this week.
“What’s all this?” Look up and behold…lots…and lots of forest tent caterpillars. Well that changed the work schedule around a little because we had to get after the little devils with no time to spare. John even got the ladder out to get higher into the tree.
Hint: Do not stand below someone who is chasing after tent caterpillars in a tree!
I was chasing some that had dropped onto my pea plants until John missed one in the tree and it dropped onto my sleeve. (Lord knows if any had dropped onto my head before that!) Luckily, I am not squeamish in the least…well, that’s not quite true. I had a hard time dealing with an infestation of bullfrogs in our pond last year and it is illegal to drop them off into the wild in B.C. More on that another time…
Back to chasing tent caterpillars…
Last thing I wanted was to distribute any hitch-hiking critters around the garden…or bring them into the house. Best of intentions…however, we are finding them all over the garden anyways, with heavier numbers in certain areas.
It has become a ritual to routinely check our young, three-tiered, espalier apple tree just planted this spring. Even checking it three or four times a day, we are finding five to eight caterpillars each time. And they love the two peonies nearby. Usually find a few caterpillars on those plants too.
Two days ago I headed out to deadhead my rugosa rose hedge out front. Been on my list for a week or more now but between the final seedings at the school gardens and having caught our daughter’s bug she brought home on her visit last week, well….
Managed to get halfway down the road side of the roses before I finally gave up to the hacking, sneezing and general “ickiness” and went inside. At least I managed to fill one garbage bag of spent roses and dead branch prunings! Felt good about that.
But, in the time I spent on the roses, I must have killed at least 50 forest tent caterpillars. They were mainly concentrated right by the driveway entrance, thinning out a bit as I went along.
So. Were there egg masses laid in our Acer saccharinum (silverleaf maple) last summer? Hard to tell as it is a huge tree and the egg masses are always laid in the upper reaches of the tree canopy.
I would not mind the caterpillars feeding on the maple leaves. There are a lot of them and the tree is likely not to show off much sign of caterpillar chewings. But it seems the forest tent caterpillars have a taste for my roses and that I do mind!
(For more information on the forest tent caterpillar, check out this page. And for information on the northern tent caterpillar, check out this page.)
