Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Crawling or Flying
More ot those hideous caterpillars
They crawled all over the house, the grounds, and consumed every leaf from every hardwood tree in the woods. They stripped apple trees and sassafras trees to bare branches and left a forest of naked trees in their wake.
Bare oaks are actually covered with gypsy moth caterpillars
And they will be back this year. They are here already, just sleeping. Why can’t we be birds and fly away … away … away …
Heron taking flight
Osprey returning home to the aerie
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Categories: #Birds, #gallery, #Photography, Cee's Photo Challenge, Home
SERENDIPITY - SEEKING INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH 
I remember your creepy crawlers. Perfect for this challenge. 😀 😀
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Yes, they are, but unfortunately, they will be back for real. Again. In a few months. Hard to believe when it’s 7 degrees and snowing hard that four months from now, we’ll be fighting off Gypsy moth caterpillars!
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I was hoping it was a once every ten year thing (gypsy moths). Let’s hope for some miserable weather to take them out. That miserable weather has to be go for something.
Leslie
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A LOT of rain can help, but otherwise, these guys are very sturdy. We need — ironically because I’m terrified of them — white-headed wasps, the big bad tempered ones that scare the crap out of me. They will kill them. Most birds other than robins won’t eat them. Even the bats avoid them.
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Let’s just hope they are wrong about them coming back this year.
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They aren’t. This isn’t an ugly rumor. They know.
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😦
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That Robin is wonderful Marilyn! The crawly things- not so much(great pics) just their destruction
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Robins eat the crawlies, but we don’t have nearly enough robins and far, far too many ugly caterpillars.
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I remember the days of the caterpilar invasion, something you do not forget easily. I wish we had herons where we live, but only get swans and ducks and storks.
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Herons aren’t rare anywhere on the coasts of North America. California has it’s own that are very similar and there are herons down in the Gulf states (Louisiana and Texas as well as the west coast of Florida). I think they live as far north as Canada, but only along the coast. We are a bit inland, but as a big bird like that flies, not very far at all, and they nest along the lakes and rivers. The sight of a colony of Great Blue Herons nesting in trees is amazing. They are 6 feet or more tall, with a wingspan to match. Some years, I see a lot of them. It’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time — with a camera. They follow the fish since that’s pretty much their entire diet. If we aren’t having a drought, we have a lot of them. Big ones. Little ones. Medium ones, too. And Egrets — the pretty white cousins of the bigger herons. If you have cranes, they look a lot alike. I think they are also related. They all look just a little bit like dinosaurs 🙂
AS for the caterpillars, it’s such a depressing thought, I just keep hoping the garden tech guys are wrong, but they gently keep telling me that they KNOW they will be back and they will do their best to lower the impact, but gypsy moths are permanent Massachusetts residents now — they have always lived in Europe which is where they are from — live here now. They are never REALLY gone. Just some years, they don’t swarm and fortunately, the non-swarming years are more frequent than the swarming ones. It really IS a freaking nightmare, though.
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That is a lot of gypsy moths! I hope you won’t have so many this year.
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All those furry, crawling things! I found myself scratching a body-wide itch when I saw the pictures of the fuzzy bugs. Hey, can I interest you in a power washer filled with Raid? 🙂
I was immediately reminded of the utterly forgettable B-movie, “The Creeping Terror.” Yes, the ones on the home are just a few inches long as opposed to the sizable “Terror,” but somehow that is what came to mind. Perhaps its because the legs of the shaggy creepy-crawlies oddly reminded me of the sight of the human operators’ feet as they mistakenly protruded from beneath the “Terror’s” frame in the film. Then again, who knows? Even as I sit here typing, I have no solid clue why my mind drifted onto the above.
All I know is that I need to start scratching again…
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So, imagine actually LIVING FOR REAL in the creeping terror and YES, they cause ugly welted rashes that don’t go away for a LONG time, so if you have to go out, you have to gear up: long sleeves, long pants, socks, hat, and preferably, gloves. What FUN. I do not watch those stupid movies because I have nightmares about this stuff … so to actually find myself living in it for … gee, it seems longer … a month I guess, maybe five weeks? … Nightmare city. Waking nightmares. They would come in on the dogs fur, too, and we would have to pick them off. They don’t do any damage in the house, except being hideous, but shiver. Ick. Yuk. Disgusting.
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Ew ew ew… Those crawlers. I had just forgotten them and now here they are again!!! Great shots. Love the robin with action wings!
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The robin was a happy accident. He just decided to take off exactly when I shot.
The caterpillars are another problem and it is so depressing to know we’ll have to survive that again. It is as horrible as it looks and worse, they touch you and you wind up with welts. Poisonous, destructive, and ugly. The trifecta.
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The county put traps on my land for them once. We had a few but a drop in the bucket compared to yours. Ugh.
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The western states have done a pretty good job containing them. By the time they had gotten that far west, they had done horrendous damage everywhere on the east coast, so they took measures and at least managed to contain them. But not stop them. They don’t swarm unless they have an oak woods to eat. That’s their food. Oak. Any kind of oak. Also maple and other hardwoods for dessert and sometimes, pine — which doesn’t recover from defoliation, so there are huge dead forests where the gypsy moths have attacked the pine trees. I’m just hoping this is not as bad as last year.
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Won’t hit “like.” Painful to watch the foliage disappear.
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Scary, too. Until the leaves come back, I’m not sure they have survived. I live in dread of acres of dead oak trees.
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Great shots of the birds! I do hope you don’t have as many caterpillars as last summer!
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They will be back. Probably not quite as bad, but they will be back. The idea is totally demoralizing. They are never really gone. They have been in the ecosystem for 150 years, since some moron let them loose from a lab in Boston. Fortunately, they are cyclical and after this year, we may get another decade before they come back.
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That’s a really unusual cycle, with two years of caterpillars, then a decade or so of none. Hopefully there won’t be as many this year as last, and hopefully they’ll leave some leaves on the trees!
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Some years are very bad, some tolerable, but Gypsy Moths are permanent residents, especially in New England, but they have spread and now do substantial damage in the Pacific Northwest and California and everywhere in between. And it’s an introduced pest. NOT native to this continent. Talk about illegal immigrants, some idiot imported them. On purpose.
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I “liked” this one but that’s not what I feel about these tossers.
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Hard to like Gypsy moths. I bet they don’t even like each other.
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