When shopping at south common I seen a bunch on a towering poplar, [when loosening 2 girdling stake wire] none at my place so far, ..actually never seen it as bad as you describe.

Yes, we have never had tent caterpillars that bad! Yikes! Usually if we have a bad year, you'll see a bunch of tents in the trees and then the next year it'll be the same as usual(few of them). We do certainly have some of these at our place every year..they are probably the most common caterpillar that I see, but so far I don't see any tents.

I guess, it very much depends on the amount of trees that surrounds you ... white poplar, birch and willow being some of the tent caterpillars favorite food. Back in the 80's, when I had lived near Sangudo (nw of Edmonton) over a period of several years, the buggers had continuously built up over consecutive years to the point of plague proportion. Then, in the final year of that particular epidemic, they defoliated the ENTIRE near and far landscape and utterly exhausted their food supply over thousands of square miles and starved to death before having the chance to mature onto the cocoon phase. During those years, I had needed to make some type of barrier to halt them from crawling up the trunks of desirable landscape and fruit trees and hand picked and sprayed from other ornamentals. The large poplar trees would have a wide row of caterpillars marching up and another row marching down! Several times a day, I would sweep off and sides of the house and destroy as many of the buggers as I could. Now, don't read the following if you have a queasy stomach ... at one point, I had come across a very large area of putrefied rotting caterpillars 3 inches deep that had piled up at the bottom of a steep slope, of course I had been left gagging! After that plague, the following next 20 years, not one tent caterpillar was to be spotted in my area, thankfully!

Those little guys usually dominate hear. The tent catepillars. Usually take a third of the leaves off my front yard and blacken the cement so that your windshield wipers are stuck on the windshield from so much of their waste. The drought has slowed them down somewhat. I'm picking what I can but they come down from the city trees on their string lines. It will be several weeks before they are finished unfortunately.

Oh my gosh, I feel like I am reading some horror stories here!!! Are they very prevalent around the prairies? Scary stuff indeed....

Ostrich, I'm not sure as to how widespread tent caterpillars are in regions south of the Boreal Forest.

I've seen the highway slick and greasy with masses of caterpillars, so thick that we had needed to drive slowly ... and, yes, the buggers have caused accidents.