Ray in New Orleans

Just in the last couple years it seems to me. And the hurt like a mother.

Ray,
I am 53 and I don't remember the buck mouth caterpillars growing up. I do remember harmless ones we called inch worms. I did have a run in like Liam a few yearsw ago and the swelling was really scarry. I later found out that you need to take benedryl within 20 minutes of the exposure for it to help. My swelling went down within 24 hours. I hope Liam is doing better now.

Obviously.. caterpillar intensity increases with proximity to trees. Menckles and I are planning to celebrate this caterpillar season with our very own Buckmothfest this or next weekend. Meaning.. we're going to cook out on the sidewalk and drink beer and.. you know.. celebrate the caterpillar. Maybe we'll see if we can find some nearby and have them race or something.

caterpillar intensity increases with proximity to trees.

Well, yeah, I realize that. But it's not like I lived in a treeless desert. I lived in Algiers and went to the old Franklin, so I spent plenty of time around oak trees.

So you're from here, right, Jeffrey? Do you remember the caterpillars being here all your life, or did they turn up at some point?

Yeah I've always seen them around town. I haven't been stung since I was like seven years old.. but they've been here for generations.

In fact.. I think one of the WYES local history documentaries.. probably "All on a Mardi Gras Day" Features remembrances of the caterpillars infesting the oak trees on N Claiborne.. before the I-10 came through Treme.

Huh. Well, there you go. My memory sucks. Either that or I'd been inadvertently following around the caterpillar sprayer guy my whole life.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY FM!

Thank you baby.

I don't remember even hearing the name "buckmoth caterpillars" until I was in my 20's, and I've lived here all my life. But then again, I'm a downtown boy, and this seems to have been (I guess) a mainly Uptown problem back then.

Who's the big, strong, hot-as-fuck birthday boy? You're the big, strong, hot-as-fuck birthday boy!

Kisses,

Syl.

P.S. "FM?"

Funktastic mixmaster?
Fun Machine?
Furry Mons?
Fellated Man?

SPANKINGS ALL AROUND!
I'm throwing confetti in your general direction. Happy Bday, Ray :)

Dammit, dammit. Tell Liam I'm sorry. I got stung by one of those bastards last year when it dropped on my purse while we were waiting outside Lola's for a table after JazzFest. Got barbs in a spot on my arm where I used to get hot wax glass tool burns, so it hurt double. A waitress at Lola's got one of those lint rollers, though, and pulled out a lot of the barbs with the thing, so it wasn't so bad. They make a satisfying CRUNCH when you stomp 'em, but the tradeoff is the spraying-out of the snot-colored guts.

Oh, and happy birthday to you! 8-)

"I'm a downtown boy"

Downtown much more interesting than uptown. ;)

Well... for the record... I grew up in Gentilly and was quite familiar with the caterpillars from a very early age.

Also the film I site.. while the greatest piece of evidence.. does indeed include testimony regarding caterpillars on North Claiborne Ave.. a decidedly "downtown" locale.

In other words.. caterpillars are not a uniquely "uptown" phenomenon.

Well... for the record... I grew up in Gentilly and was quite familiar with the caterpillars from a very early age.

Also the film I cite.. while not the greatest piece of evidence.. does indeed include testimony regarding caterpillars on North Claiborne Ave.. a decidedly "downtown" locale.

In other words.. caterpillars are not a uniquely "uptown" phenomenon.

There was no buckmoth infestation in new Orleans when you were at Franklin. I'll make anybody a reasonable wager on that. There's a difference between "buckmoth caterpillars" and "caterpillars." Also, Ray was freshman at Franklin when I was senior and I'm 12 or 13 years older than Jeffrey. When I was at Franklin, on occasion a student would accidently touch one of those fuzzy ones that looked cocoons, but the only caterpillars that ever fell from the oak trees were the non-stinging tent caterpillars.

If anything, it seems like there was a bigger variety of stinging caterpillars when I was a kid, but none were as plentiful or mobile as the buckmoths. The first time I remember getting stung by a buckmoth was in 1986, there's a reason why I can remember the specific year. If you look at the forest service website, it says that buckmoth infestation has been a problem in the area for a number of years, which implies that it started at some point. I'm willing to bet it started in the mid-eighties. I think I even remember articles about them being a new phenomenom, at least in those numbers.

I don't remember these buckmoth caterpillars in the Marigny during the early '60s in the Marigny, and I played with anything that moved back then. (My mom wanted to skin me for feeding a Nutria that lived in the storm drain)

BTW- Happy B'Day baby! Don't worry, I won't give you 30 whacks with my whip.

I was born here and have lived here all my life and don't ever remember anything like the outrageous buckmoth caterpillar invasions of the last 20 years. All you have to do is look in my April blog archives for any year and there will be some mention of them.

The worst year I remember was 1988, the year I bought my house with the big oak beside it. That year, I remember people walking down Carrollton under the oaks with umbrellas deployed in fear of caterpillar rain (reign?), residents' feeble attempts to stop the creatures descent from the trees by wrapping the trunks in aluminum foil, and the city mounting a major pesticide offensive with trucks dispatched to spray the trees on public thoroughfares. As hard as it is for me to believe now, the city even responded to residents' calls to spray infested trees in neighborhoods.

This year I seem to have a lot of the larval bastards prowling in, on and around my house, but I can hardly remember a year since I've lived here when they weren't around.

And for the record, my mother has a large, old oak in front of her house in Jefferson and I've only seen two or three buckmoth caterpillars around here this year and have no real recollection of her ever having any noticeable scourge of them.

In addition to smushing the barb-arian larva, we stomp and smash the moths when they start fluttering around in late November every year, reasoning that every dead moth is potential 100+ eggs that will not be laid. We do the same when we find the big, ugly pupae in the soil in the area where the caterpillars have roamed.

BTW, I find that "soothing" aloe gel with lidocaine (topical anesthetic) in it relieves the pain of a sting pretty well.

Now, having said all that, (belated) Happy Birthday to you!

Well, I would have still been in the Upper Ninth until the latter half of the 80's; I definately do not remember any "buckmoth" caterpiller infestations in the Franklin Avenue oaks I was under so frequently, but I guess maybe we Ninth Warders were just too dumb to know that some of the various little "furry worms" we saw were the dreaded buckmoths. I do know that we never saw them in any kinds of numbers such that the problem couldn't be handled by a little judiciously applied pedal pressure ("Smoosh!").

Maybe we really did have buckmoth caterpillar infestations Downtown in the 70's and 80's, but unlike the folks Uptown didn't see it as the kind of problem you complained about to local news organizations so it made the 10:00 Eyewitness News? I know I certainly wasn't aware of the concept of expecting the City to be responsible to keep caterpillars out of trees, but then we probably were cursed with low expectations that kept us from knowing a lot of things that the City or other agencies were supposed to be responsible for. Kind of like when I responded with "Wait....people can really do that? And they'll come do it?" to the old "How many Uptowners does it take to change a light bulb?" joke......LOL.

In my comment, I meant to say "that looked like cocoons." That might not be the best description, you still see them, they're fuzzy (almost woolly- looking_ and don't move much. Those and a few other type of stinging caterpillars, the fuzzy all black kind come to mind, have been around as long as I can remember.

Welcome to Buckmoth Catapillers 101 -
You will be quizzed with the expectation of straight A's. Those with grades below A will be required to complete a group project of counting every catapiller downtown and uptown. Said group will then be required to haul smallest said cat population to the other larger affected area. Monitering for 1 year will be expected including keeping all catapillers within bounds of said part of town and attending to stingees.
So it is said, so it shall be done.
amen

PS - this is what ya do when you're eating popeyes at your desk and working. Nobody told me Popeyes was all the way down past Napoleon and the chicken strips weren' fried and every fickin' body in the place got their chicken before me. Grrrr....

I recall they were nasty and pleantiful in Carrollton in the late '70s, but heard somewhere that they were either an introduced pest or that their natural predators had been wiped out, so the great numbers of them was something recent at the time.