The Very Hungry Caterpillars

On Saturday I took my mom to church for 5:30 Mass. Afterwards we went to the cemetery where she placed the carnations she had just bought on the graves of her sister, her mother, and my father. Then we went home.

We were making some small talk as I pulled into the driveway around 7:30. I'm not sure what I was saying as I shifted into Park and put on the parking brake, but as soon as I had us safely in place and relaxed my eyes I immediately exclaimed "Holy crap! Look at the wall!"


The wall was covered with dozens of caterpillars.

Now, you're not gonna get the full effect of what I saw in these photos, because I've chosen not to show you the entire Northern wall of my house. If I were to do that you would only see a wall with a few tiny dark marks on it. These closeups show the caterpillars better. Plus I got some nifty shadows in the closeups.

I knew this was going to be a bumper year for tent caterpillars, but seeing your house covered in the little buggers is quite a shock.

I don't like killing. I avoid it whenever I can. I'm no Jain, to be sure, but I don't believe in killing unless absolutely necessary. I have captured hornets and bees indoors where they threatened / were threatened by my coworkers and transported them to safety outdoors. I have used fly psychology to lead houseflies out of a room, down a hall, through another room, out onto the back porch, and to the relative safety of the great outdoors. (Houseflies head toward light. Why do you think they gather on windows?)

But I've lived through major Gypsy Moth outbreaks, which do damage similar in nature to tent caterpillars, but much more severe. I've seen the mountains of Northeastern Pennsylvania stripped almost bare of leaves. I've watched trees die from the damage.

Some things just need killing.

So kill I did. It was brutal, it was nasty, and it was remarkably futile. I killed dozens of tent caterpillars. Thousands more were probably within just a few square meters around me.


These things are beautiful, in their own way, especially when I am viewing them and their shadows in a series of photos. But it's entirely another thing to watch them crawling all over your house, your plants, your trees.

I wonder if Bt is effective against them. I've used it in the past, but that was long ago. Since then Bt - a bacteria toxic to many caterpillars - has not only been accepted outside of the Organic Gardening community, it has been embraced, and perhaps over-exploited, and even has had its genes incorporated into certain bioengineered crops - increasing the size of the populations of insects exposed to Bt and the likelihood of Bt-resistant mutant offspring gaining a reproductive advantage against their non-resistant relatives. From what I just read, that's already happening.
I've carried my camera in my car these last two days, hoping to catch the caterpillars in the act when I came home. Yesterday I didn't get home until well after dark, but today I was in luck as the wall had quite a few caterpillars scattered around. As a bonus, as the sun was dropping into the West it cast beautiful shadows and even some bonus reflections off of windshields and house windows.
So when I was done I was faced with an ethical dilemma: squish the little buggers then and there? After they had just modeled for me? It didn't feel right.

OK. A deal. I went into the house and shuffled around the packages I had just unloaded from my mom's car. (It's Senior Citizens' Day at the local supermarket, and she got her 5% discount, and she was able to load all the packages into her car, but didn't want to try to drag them up the steps and into the house.) I killed time for a few minutes, maybe five. Tent caterpillars are fast. Maybe they would hurry along on their journeys and get wherever they were going, somewhere out of my sight. Maybe a whole new crop would take their place on the walls.

When time was up, I went outside and killed every tent caterpillar I could find. It was brutal. It was probably futile. But at least it felt like I was doing something.