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The
Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
June 30 - July 6, 2005 Edition
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North Road: Invasion of the Worms June 30, 2005 I was sitting outside the back steps of my house on the brick circle my son had constructed, catching my breath after an early morning walk. My effervescent year-old springer Ticker lay panting after retrieving a few throws of an old tennis ball. All around me lay unfinished yard work which I wasn’t about to dig into it this early summer morning with sun streaming down through a light haze. My coffee was almost gone by the time my eyes lighted on some errant wisteria grown to the treetops in my neighbor’s back yard. Long clusters of violet blossoms festooned against the sky. The wisteria were quite unlike the delicate network of white threads bearing at their ends tiny green inch worms I had encountered on my walk just ended. I wondered at these creatures’ physiologic ability to produce such a convenient conveyance from 50 feet above the road to ground or onto my arm. If they are anything like the silkworm, they form silk in glands within their bodies continuously and it exits through an opening in the head. As they crawl about their cocoon, a layer of protective silk builds and as they fall from tree branches a continuous rope of silk lowers them gently to earth. In this way some larvae travel on the wind for long distances. Some of the creatures were already on my forearms struggling to escape the hair. As they doubled their front ends upward and pushed along a segment at a time, I thought they were really too cute to smash, but I soon relinquished that absurdity when I found they left me with a fantasy of my skin alive with their parachuted troops. A neighbor on her walk up the road had counted twelve in a row hanging before her eyes. On my next walk I looked up and discovered hit-or-miss aerial webs, not only vertical but in all directions and literally dozens of troops floating tether-bound to earth. The top branches of leaves above me were feathered like lace where these larvae had been feasting in the important feeding phase of their life cycle (moth to eggs to larvae to pupa). I listened for the sound of falling frass, but if it was there it escaped my marginal hearing. When I reached home I found evidence of the worms’ excreta on the windshield of my car which had already made several traverses of this place before I had noticed the invasion. By the time I reached the kitchen I had counted six or eight worms which I removed from arms, neck, behind the ear and from my cap. My wife found two more on my T-shirt and, by then, squirming all over, I doffed my shirt, turned it inside out and found two more. This was not a happy morning. Once having the invasion starkly in my consciousness, I became aware of feathered tree branches over much of the mid-Island and Chilmark. What I had thought was the thinness of leaf cover of early cold spring was in all probability the ravages of the worms (larvae). A Times correspondent reported he had heard the patter of dropping frass, not unlike a gentle rainfall, the result of hordes of invaders munching on leaves. Talk of spraying was in the air among neighbors. As an old beekeeper, I wondered what the unintended consequences of that might be. Biologists were quoted as saying most trees could withstand two or three or years of consecutive defoliating, but the risk of death increased beyond that limit. A picture of bare rocky pastures between Chilmark, Aquinnah, and Edgartown flashed in my mind and I remembered a photo circa 1898 showing the pattern of stone walls through the area. An English friend once remarked on a trip up North Road that “what the Vineyard needed was a few less trees.” She was probably thinking of the pattern of neat pastures and grazing areas in the British countryside; in the fall the manicured fallow fields in different colored earth and the hedge rows properly clipped; sometimes a bright yellow field of mustard interspersed. On the Vineyard, it was a time when a safety conscious citizen cut down a swath of oaks at the blind intersection of Old County Road and State Road in West Tisbury. An environmentalist’s poem bemoaning the “rape of the trees” appeared quickly in a local paper. I like a wood-cutter friend’s comment that our worm invasion is after all just “a cycle we go through,” implying that it will end in good time. |
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