Forest tent caterpillars are not entomologist Ken Fry’s favourite insect but the black-coloured critters with vibrant blue-and-yellow marks do have a soft spot in his heart.
They’re why his dad once let him break the house rule of not climbing the two poplar trees in their backyard, so Fry could clamber to the top of one and grab hundreds of caterpillar eggs before they hatched and destroyed leaves.
‘I was about seven-years-old … My dad said, ‘Ken, get up that tree, get after those caterpillar eggs,” said Fry, who is an instructor at Olds College of Agriculture & Technology in central Alberta.
“This particular species allowed me to climb our tree with wild abandon and absolute endorsement of my parents.”
Millions and millions of forest tent caterpillars, with fur that chokes hungry birds and makes beetles think twice about their next meal, are feasting on leaves in Alberta.
Fry said the outbreak of the caterpillars, voraciously feeding now across the province’s lush areas including Edmonton’s river valley, is a natural phenomenon that happens roughly every decade across northern areas in the Prairies with boreal forest.
“An unsavoury aspect of it is what goes in must come out so, if you are under a nice aspen tree on a picnic table and all of a sudden you think, ‘Hey, where’s all these droplets coming from?’ it’s not very nice,” Fry said with laugh.
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