When Mama Was Moth

Just a word about the weather. Yesterday was truly magnificent. It is a surprise that January can produce such fine weather, but it does, and pretty much every year it serves it up. Warm and sunny (around 18), the holiday walk along the beach should have been done in shorts and flip-flops not jeans and trainers with socks; it raised a fair old sweat. The sea was flat calm and the sand firm, an indication of a lack of recent wave turbulence. Absolutely blissful.

Less blissful though is one of the natural-world’s irritants that raises its ugly head, well ugly body, at this time of the year. The processionary caterpillar* is a creature of southern and central Europe though it is migrating north. It is a thoroughly unpleasant bit of insect life that offers a dual malevolence – to trees and to humans. It is during the first couple of months of the year that it becomes a real pest.
(*So-called as colonies of individual caterpillars attach themselves to the ones in the front.)

The deal with this caterpillar is that it is moth larva, spawned by the moth that those bags you might see hanging around in forests are there to catch. The moths need to be taken off the streets – as it were – to stop them producing the caterpillars. Not only do the caterpillars cause great harm to pine trees, they also have a nasty habit of falling out of the trees and poisoning passing humans. If you happen to see any army of brown, furry-looking caterpillars forming a caravan, on no account touch them. One of the best treatments for them – gruesome though it may sound – is to set fire to them. The devastation that the caterpillar can cause to trees (and the oak is also susceptible to a different caterpillar) is akin to that wreaked by the beetle responsible for the fungus of Dutch elm disease. The poison emitted can cause serious skin reactions.

Avoiding the little buggers is a bit tricky. Go for a walk in a forested area here (or indeed just down many a road), and there will be numerous pine trees ready to dispatch the caterpillars. Daft though it might sound, a hat and keeping skin covered up is a wise precaution if walking in forests in January and February. Don’t hug a hoodie, wear one.

One way of trying to short-circuit the problems they cause is to shoot them down (and then deal with them), and this does indeed happen, so if you hear gun shots going off, it could well be a whole bunch of caterpillars – a sort of land-based equivalent of jellyfish – being blasted.

Apparently, there is also meant to be some spraying going on to kill the caterpillars. If this is from the air, which I understand it is, then a question is why not do this for the mosquitoes? A reason for stopping that spraying was the ecological impact. There again, mosquitoes don’t harm trees. Something’s wrong here I feel.


QUIZ
Yesterday – CCS (Alexis Korner). Today’s title – real personal indulgence here; one of my “favourites” from my profile did this.

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