Tent Caterpillars
Above: Tent Caterpillars, picture taken in Illinois on May 18, 2017
From Sue–Having a cell phone camera has added a lot of fun to my morning walks, and has led me to be curious about things I might have just passed up before. These tent caterpillars were having breakfast on some wild cherry trees. They prompted me to read a short piece about their kind for volume 49 of the nonfiction collection.
From Tent Caterpillars, by J. M. Swaine
“The tent caterpillars appear in spring and feed upon the leaves of broad-leaved trees of many species. The American Tent Caterpillar (Malacosoma Americana) is most common on fruit trees, wild cherry, and hawthorn, but when very abundant it readily attacks a variety of shade and forest trees. Its conspicuous tents, constructed during April and May are familiar to everyone. The Forest Tent Caterpillar (Malacosoma disstria) prefers poplar, birch, elm, oak, maple and other forest trees, but it is also found in orchards, particularly in years of great abundance. During the season of 1912, these two species but particularly the Forest Tent Caterpillar stripped many thousands of trees in infested districts of Quebec, Ontario, and New Brunswick. Square miles of poplar and birch were completely defoliated by the hordes of caterpillars. After the foliage of an area is destroyed, the caterpillars sometimes march in great armies in search of new food, defoliating the trees and shrubs along their route. It was not uncommon in the summer of 1912 for the trains on the Gatineau River line of the Canadian Pacific Railway, in Quebec, to be stopped by myriads of these caterpillars swarming on the rails, which were effectively greased by their crushed bodies.”
If you enjoy nature writing, you might like these books I have recorded:
The Adventures of a Nature Guide, by Enos A. Mills
The Desert, Further Studies in Natural Appearances, by John Charles Van Dyke
The Land of Little Rain, by Mary Hunter Austin
The White Heart of Mojave, by Edna Brush Perkins
or this blog post: Magic in a Clump of Cattails
