Woolly worms carpet the Land of the Sleeping Bear
By Norm Wheeler
Sun editor
It’s Biblical! It’s apocalyptic! It’s gross, it’s ridiculous, they’re so nasty! Isn’t there something we can do about them? They’re driving us crazy!
No, I’m not talking about Wall Street bankers, not the BP oil spill, not the Detroit Lions, not even the radical right tea bagger party — this time. Nope, everybody around this part of The County this week is talking about the worms! Today, Thur., May 20, the trees are still green in Glen Arbor and all the way past the Dune Climb along M-109, but as you approach Maple Grove Cemetery and M-22, you see the tent worms in the choke cherry trees, and then you look up to see the defoliation at the tops of the maples just where the woollies appear inch-worming across the road. You see people in their yards in Empire picking things off their bushes and peering with worried faces up the hill to the south, where it’s still green. But the forest is whispering!
The dreaded Eastern Forest Caterpillar population has exploded. From Empire to Traverse City along the M-72 corridor and north, especially in the higher elevations, the worms are carpeting houses, garbage cans, grills, everything. Their droppings (“frass”) make the woods tap and click as if light rain was falling, millions of pieces of unconsumed leaf particles float down, and “billions and billions” of furry, writhing, inch-and-a-half bodies rappel down their silk threads and make grotesque curtains that hang from every limb, eave, mailbox, and rearview mirror. They congregate in huge mats on your outside walls and under your roof’s edges. They squirm in unabashed, wiggling abandon on your windows in a reptilian-looking parody of a fraternity party gone bad.
In early May there were just the tent worms bivouacking in the wild cherry and unsprayed fruit trees, their silky white dwellings growing like Bedouin shelters in the desert. We sprayed ammonia mixed with water 50-50 onto the tents surrounded by the still beautifully blossoming apple boughs. The white flowers made it hard to see the white tents. It seemed to be a cruel contrast.
But now, alas, it’s worse. The leaves that grew out on every hardwood and fruit tree just days ago are already consumed. Only the veins remain, the forest a pale naked hue of light green. This turns out to be one of the most gorgeous months of May in years, weatherwise, and yet some of us can hardly get in and out of our houses without getting covered with threads and worms. My back door is a thick curtain, the doorknob a squirming clump. You kill dozens of them just grabbing the handle of the caked broom leaning there so that you can clear off the door, but 15 minutes later it is pasted over again.
Some are successful at slowing them down with sprays. Paul Czemanski of Burdickville is using BT in discreet applications so that he can continue to see the siding on his house in the woods. Mary Kay Niemisto, at the corner of Baatz and Gilbert Roads, called in a crop duster spray plane to buzz her house and yard, and it looks like it worked. Soapy water is another common nostrum. Power washing the entire house is required along Echo Valley Road, but even that is slow and difficult. The threads they share are woven right into the siding, so you end up peeling them off the walls in icky strings. Yuck!
But the infestation will be over in a couple of weeks, we’re told, and then the trees will stoically leaf out again. The first growth of leaves will have become so much nitrogen composted by the worms to enrich the forest floor, and fuzzy lemon yellow cocoons will be everywhere. Hopefully it will be easier to peel them off the house by hand than to spray off the squirming worms. Later this summer they’ll have become thousands of little moths.
Everybody is trying to make the best of it, though, except for a few whiners like me. Down in Burdickville at Laker Shakes the sign says “Tent Worms for Sale” And my friends Bruce and Ian Hood from just north of Cedar have made a startling discovery. The woolly worms are sensitive to sounds! When Ian plays the Star Spangled Banner at them on his trumpet, the worms all rise up off the wall and wiggle in a weird dance. Bruce has made a video of their wormy mosh pit, and you can see it below. Check it out. They may be a huge pain in the frass, but the worms are patriotic!