Get out your stick and coffee can!
I keep forgetting to ask my mom is she’s done this yet. For the last few weekends, I’ve been up in NH, and I noticed an abundance of gypsy moth caterpillars roaming around. I have unpleasant childhood memories of these gross fuzzy things all over everything.
I remember the gypsy moth outbreak causing a lot of the vegetation in our area to die, and it being so bad that they had to spray to control the population.
I also remember my mom “doing her part,” and enlisting anyone she could to help her out. The deal was to get a stick and a coffee can. For the moths, if you saw them, squash them. If you saw an egg sac, or a cocooned caterpillar, squash it and scrap into coffee can. The grossest part was the caterpillar elimination. Once again you’d get a stick, then find yourself a caterpillar, and poke it through with the stick. Make sure you see the bright yellow-green guts squeeze out! I’m nauseous just thinking about it.
At the end of the summer said coffee can would be thrown away. We haven’t had a big outbreak recently, so I haven’t come home to the fuzzy black bodies oozing green, or the dreaded coffee can. I can only hope they haven’t started swarming, or I know the next time I visit the coffee can and stick will be around. Ew!
