I didn't think we were having much of an issue until last week. As of now, I can't even walk across my patio any more since there are so many of the caterpillars hanging on their silks. The patio and the cars are covered with caterpillar poop. And I'm worried about all the seedlings I had put out on the patio to harden off.

Just yesterday, walking across the driveway under the maples to get to the car to go out to dinner, when we got seated at the restaurant, we found 7 caterpillars combined on me, dh and dd.

Here is the damage to one of my red maple trees from the winter moth caterpillars. 2 weeks ago there were no sign of the caterpillars here. Now they are the worst I have ever seen them.

pixie_lou...what is your general location?

I sprayed, but up the street I noticed the maples looked just like pixie's. Defoliated. lexington, ma
mt

My other red maple and my 2 silver maples have minimal damage. My unidentified maple has a bit of damage. But this red is pathetic. This one is right next to our patio, so our patio right now is totally covered in caterpillar poop, and pretty much unusable.

I'm "W"est - near the pike at 128.

I'm in SE Mass also, Fall River area, and we also have had much less winter moth caterpiller activity than last year.
Maybe they are just slow to get going in our area, or hopefully we won't be hit too bad this year.

They are abundant here in metrowest MA. I sprayed my weeping cherry with spinosad and that one is protected. All the maples and crabapple were half eaten. I sprayed those trees over the weekend. Next year, I am spraying all the trees without waiting to see evidence.

In my metrowest neighborhood they are much less abundant than in the past two years--so far. Maybe the cool weather has just slowed them down. I did discover the caterpillars had decimated one of my heucheras before I noticed and hand-picked them off.

Sorry about your red maple, Pixie Lou.

I was thinking the little beasts were in much smaller numbers, but nope, just delayed. They always start making a mess of the leaves, just as they are unfolding, but this year I had full trees full of unblemished foliage for a couple of weeks before they started showing up. Now the foliage is like swiss cheese once again and their hanging from the rafters all over the yard. Not as bad as previous years maybe, but the problem this year is that the change in timing has somehow put them out of sync with the bird population that is usually around to gobble them up. Usually, Starlings arrive just as they start making a mess and stick around for awhile to finish them off. The Starlings were here earlier but they seem to have gotten tired of waiting.

The damage here (Wareham) is horrible too. Trees are shredded, and they are eating heurcheras like crazy too. Disgusting!

Negligible damage here in my section of Plymouth. I'm surprised at the report from Wareham which is just to the west of here.

Claire

I think they may be late. We had our trees sprayed, but I'm not sure it did much good. The poop is everywhere. It sounds like rain in my back yard. I'm just northwest of Boston.

Ornamental pear trees have lots of holes, but the Japanese maples don't look touched, at least not yet. Come to think of it, the caterpillars seemed to leave them alone last year too. The oaks were somewhat defoliated, though not nearly as badly as Pixie Lou's maple.

I hope it's going to be like the gypsy moths 30 years ago, the population built up to a point then some disease got them. I don't know the details or whether it's likely with these critters, but I hope so.

lovesummer - I'm dissapointed to hear that spraying was not successful for you. I was planning on calling my arborist this week to discuss a caterpillar plan.

Here is another photo of my devastated Red Maple. This is the same tree I posted a photo of last week. There is considerable more damage. This tree is right in the reverse curve of our patio, so I'd really hate to loose this tree.

Interesting, this Red Maple is about 40 feet away, and there is minimal damage on this tree. You can see the one branch in the front (closest to the devastated tree) that has lost most of it's leaves.

since I moved - only a few towns away - I haven't seen them in this area. They were bad at my last house. I had discovered a few summers ago they liked to lay their eggs in the cracks between my brick patio. I'd pour tons of boiling water over the patio every spring. Probably hardly made a dent in the entire population.

I do find an occasional moth in the house about the exact same size and color -- but since it's summer I figure it has to be something else.

I'm not sure if we have this moth here in Concord yet, but I have been seeing some little green caterpillars around, so maybe it is.

Below is a link to an interesting article in Boston.com, says that this year is supposed to be the worst since 2005. Also that the moth is moving 7-8 kilometers west each year. But the good news is that they're releasing a parasitic wasp (also from Europe) that preys upon the caterpillars.

Here is a link that might be useful: This spring, winter moths may dominate

That Boston.com article is actually a year old. Everything from UMass says that this year isn't as bad, but from looking at my trees, I'm not sure I agree.

This was a strange year. I'm just north of Boston in Melrose. We got lucky with the long, very cool spring compared to the last couple years. It seemed to allow my blueberries and fruit trees to push flower buds before the winter moth got revved up. I managed to get a couple rounds of BT during bloom and a round of Triazacide at petal fall before too much damage. I have one cherry that does not appear to have a single spot of damage and a couple others with very minimal damage. May actually get a blueberry crop this year. No triazicide there, but the BT held the little buggers in check. Worst hit was a pie cherry that had a very late bloom. The BT slowed them down, but still took a lot of damage. The maples in the neighborhood are absolutely shattered.

I'm in Franklin and the damage is terrible. The trees look shredded and they are attacking a lot of the plants on the ground now like daylily and such. It looks worse than last year. I didn't spray spinosad due to rain, but plan to today. Anything that can kill them before they totally kill the smaller ornamentals I have.

Ooops sorry I posted an old article! Thought it was from this year...

I am in Plymouth and last week they weren't there. This week you can hear them the minute you step outside - yuk! My question is does anyone know how to clean off the poop? I have pavers at both the garage and the street ends of the driveway. The pavers at the garage end are significantly darker than the ones at the other end, because of the poop. It looks awful. Had anyone had any luck?

Mahoney's just sent out an email alert about winter moths

Claire

I had started another thread earlier this season about getting rid of these. Last two years, they had attacked my trees and most were defoliated. The cherry tree put out another set of leaves after the fist was gone and the caterpillars had pupated by then, but the second set was not as big/plentiful as the first one. So this year I decided to take action. After reading around and help from forum members, I decided that spinosad (the one I used was - Captain Jack's deadbug brew) was the golden mean between being effective and least side effects.
I watched under the tree in first few weeks of April before the trees bloom to see when the eggs hatch. When the eggs hatch .. you will see very nice small blue eggs in the ground under the tree. Then the tiny caterpillars go to the bud and go inside it, After the bud opens, they come out and start munching on leaves when the leaves pop out.
I sprayed the tree when bloom was gone and I could see holes in the leaves. (wet spinosad is toxic to bees, after the bloom was gone, bees did not go to the cherry tree). After a few days, I still saw some more new leaves being eaten, so I sprayed again. Since then I haven't seen any more evidence of caterpillar on that tree and the tree looks beautiful. So I assume that first spraying got more than 50% and second took care of all the remaining.
Here is a link from UM-Amherst that has good information

Here in the SE corner of Plymouth I'm beginning to see some damage on the oaks but not major defoliation. Some frass (poop) and I saw one caterpillar this morning. The birds are visiting the trees rather than the feeders so I hope they're gorging themselves on caterpillars.

Claire

ebet - Our driveway is below a maple tree, so our cars have been covered in caterpillar poop lately. )n Monday DH and I spent the day washing both our cars. His car is gold, so we had to scrub pretty good, but with a bit of elbow grease, some old washcloths and a very very healthy squirt of dish detergent, we were able to clean both cars of all caterpillar poop. Based on that success, today I spent the morning out on my patio. Instead of scrubbing on my hands and knees (my patio is 600+ sf), I used an old nylon bristle broom. It took me about an hour, but I think my patio is poop free now!

Is the spinosad the insecticide of choice then for this problem? How does one get it to the top of the tree??

What about Malathon?