And after a weekend of the sorrow (and hopeful liturgy)
regarding the shootings at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in
Charleston; some of us’s blithe attendance at popcorn movies like Jurassic World; and some of us slobbing around
at the beach or at a hotdog-infested Father’s Day picnic, the following might
be refreshing.
In my immediate township, especially on the mountain on
which I live, an organism has come and done a lot of damage—followed its
natural course, been selfish as such an entity naturally is—and the blight is
here to see. Damage up high, and evidence of damage on the ground.
What is this? Gypsy moth damage. Up here in the mountains of
the northwest of the state. I don’t know if other parts of the state have
gotten this.
My mother had mentioned seeing in the newspaper some weeks
back—I didn’t see it—news about how the state or township (my indefiniteness) wasn’t going to spray for gypsy moths this year,
as it has done in the past. The article apparently conveyed there was not
enough area (in our township) to make spraying worthwhile this year
(budget-wise), or some such reasoning.
Over past years, the fact of spraying—as far as I knew about
it—had become routine enough, and perhaps whatever gypsy moth presence was
minor enough, that I hadn’t thought of gypsy moths as a major problem in my
immediate area for, seemingly, decades. (The article you can see here, which is from a newspaper in neighboring
Morris County, outlines some of the ways the spraying programs are tackled,
which I hadn’t known about. [I didn’t read all this article.] My township, in
Sussex County, may have routinely followed a different system; and whether the
decision here not to spray this year was typical or not, budget-conscious or
not, I don’t know. And I don’t know how much, as a standard thing, local
townships and counties work closely with the state on this.)
This year, gypsy moths are a problem in my local area.
They’re a kind of moth that starts out as a caterpillar,
which does the most damage. You could see the “tents” of the cobwebby homes a big
batch of baby caterpillars live in (though I didn’t really see this sight this
year) [correction 6/25/15: after my mother did a rare proofreading of this blog entry, she pointed out that what we've long called "tent caterpillars" are different from gypsy moths, which I could assent to being right; actually, "tent" caterpillars, I think, usually appear later in the summer, and I don't remember when I last saw them around here; but still, gypsy moth caterpillars must be born in small multi-young webs of some sort]; and then the caterpillars, tiny at first, come out and fan out through
the canopies of trees. And they eat the trees’ leaves—and eat and eat and eat.
And get bigger as caterpillars.
Eventually the caterpillars get into weird, tan,
fuzzy-looking cocoon-related things on the trees, with a brown, semi-smooth chrysalis,
out of which eventually a moth hatches. The moths aren’t so bad; they may flap
around annoyingly, and you don’t want them getting into your house. But as I
recall from past infestations, the moth phase isn’t as bad as what the
caterpillars do.
This year, there were so many caterpillars that, by now, you
see many broken pieces of green leaves all around on the ground: it looks like
fall already, in this way. Some trees are missing so many leaves (oaks,
especially, seem to have been hit hard) that they look like it’s early April or
late October. The defoliation isn’t everywhere, but selective. When you drive
past wooded areas near me, you can go from very-densely leafy areas to areas
where there are so few leaves, it looks like early spring (or fall) there.
When I was in the valley several days ago, where you could
see the mountains (on which I live), which rise about 800 feet from the valley,
and you see them from about half a mile away, you could see rich green on most
of them, but places where there were brown streaks—the distant view of patches
of trees missing leaves, likely due to gypsy moths.
A mile or so north of my home, the township road of Barry
Drive North phases into Barrett Road (they were originally one continuous road),
the latter of which starts/stops at a mountain top, with the more old-time-design
Barrett Road essentially climbing a long way from its opposite end in New York
State, on State Route 94; the climb in altitude, for a few miles, is roughly
800 feet. In the winter, if there is an ice storm on the mountaintop that is a
function of altitude, you start seeing the icy trees as you near where Barrett
Road tops out at its junction with Barry Drive North. Well, now, a lot of trees
in this mountaintop “brow” area are so bare of leaves, they look like they are
almost ready for winter.
##
Also, this late spring, when the caterpillars were at their
height of feeding—they are past that, now—you could hear a lot of rapid-succession
“ticking” in the leaves as they dropped little pieces of excrement on the
ground. Eating and crapping—that’s their illustrious lives. And the specks of
excrement—weird, uneven-surface little berry-like things made of slightly
discolored leaves—have littered the ground, looking somewhat like olive-colored
versions of the white sleet pellets you might see in the winter. Recent rains
had swept some of these away.
What a hit we took this year from gypsy moths.
I remember many years ago—the late ’60s or early ’70s, when
we first lived here in northwestern New Jersey—the gypsy moths could do such damage to trees
that some sections of woods would have a lot of dead trees clustered together. It
looked as if something—like a forest fire, or flooding from a beaver—had caused
a huge section of trees to die en masse
and seemingly for bad reasons. At least, “gypsy moths” was the explanation I
heard as a kid. Then, it became a regular program for spraying for them to
happen each spring. (Again, I don’t know how much towns did this with help from
the state.) I’m not sure if it was regularly (annually) done from the early
1970s to now. [Update 6/26/15: Strangely, for the past week or a little more, a mass phenomenon has been happening with the caterpillars: They have crawled down the trunks of the trees in whose canopy they were eating, and came to a stop near the bottoms of the trunks, and seem to have died there. Some have ended up, individually, in various places on the ground and like limp pieces of yarn, seemingly dead. This sort of thing has happened in past years. What is up now? Has there been a government-done spraying this season (a week or a little more ago)? Or has insecticide left in the trees from a past year's spraying ended up killing them, after they've grown to a fairly adult size (an inch and a half long or so)? Not sure, but it's certain a good number of trees have had their leaves damaged or removed from this year's caterpillar feeding.]
And I think, also, that the amount of gypsy moths coming
into an area can vary; that may be something where the infestation cyclically goes
way down (the article I linked to in this entry suggests so)—whether or not due
to spraying the year before—and comes back as a function of the chancy way
these creatures can ebb and flow like other creatures that manage to beat
threats to their existence.
Never mind my vague generalities about the history of these
creatures. They truly did a number on some of our trees (including in the local
state park) this year. My mother said she’d read that trees could take two
years’ worth of blighting by gypsy moths before they could then be apt to die
from lack of leaves in the summer. Whatever the case, it seems like we’re
missing a full complement of summer greenery around here this year; some of the
woods have been cheated of their summer due.
