Eastern Tent Caterpillars

Some of you may be wondering just exactly what you are seeing here in this picture above. Others know exactly what I have here. What you see in the picture above are Eastern Tent Caterpillars. I've been finding them all over the forest this year. Last year I only found their empty tents, but no caterpillars. Now those tents are very full.

These caterpillars are considered to be pests. Every several years an outbreak of these caterpillars occurs, and they can quickly defoliate a plant or tree once they get started eating. There is one good thing about this situation though. The plant they eat the leaves off of almost always recovers just fine. Their only real permanent damage is their ugliness.

People who have cherry or apple trees on their property that are intended for decoration most likely hate these eastern tent caterpillars with a passion. These caterpillars will strip their poor trees of all of their leaves in quick fashion. The best way to get rid of them is to simply tear up their tent-like nest with a stick.

Even with all this talk of them being pests, I still found them very interesting to look at. This is the first year I've been able to watch them, and I don't often get to see caterpillars at all. So far I've seen only one type of caterpillar each year, and I've been looking for them desperately.

You may have noticed that I'm showing you two different nests of these creatures. I have two different reasons for doing so. First, I saw at least half a dozen of these tents in the same forest. So I wanted to show you more than one. The second reason is a big problem I've been having.

The problem is with my fancy new camera. You see, I've been having trouble getting closeup shots of any kind. I've been trying everything I can think of, but I can't do macro shots with it. The first tent just would not focus when I was close. This camera is supposed to be good at this kind of thing, but it obviously works differently than my old camera. I also can't seem to get manual focus to help.

So my solution has been to experiment quite a bit at home, and I'll continue with some of what I've learned the next time I go out. I hope I'll be back very soon with some excellent macro shots for you. Maybe a kind squirrel will let me stick my camera right up to its face. Yeah right!

Mayapple

I don't usually write about plants, mostly because I just like animals so much. And the animals move around, so it's easier to write about what happened. But I do like to see flowers while I'm out there too. And there are certain plants that have become special to me. The one I'm featuring today is one of those. It's called Mayapple.

It actually took me quite some time before I found the name of this plant. I began to notice the plants growing in the middle of the dark forest last year. I watched as so many of them began to sprout up last spring. They look so distinctive that I soon became very interested in them.

But there was only one problem I had with that. I had no idea how to identify a plant back then. I was just beginning to learn a few flowers, which are the easiest plants to identify for me. It was finally after they were all gone that I accidentally stumbled across the name of these plants, so I decided to wait until this spring to write anything about them.

But wait. I've been saying they are just plants, and implying that they're not flowers. Well, I didn't think they were flowers until about a week ago. One day I noticed these buds on the underside of the big leaves of the plants. I took this picture for my records. Then the very next time I was out the buds had all erupted into the beautiful white flowers like you see at the top.

And I guess you may have noticed by now that I haven't exactly shown you the whole plant. That's going to happen right now. As you can see they have pretty big leaves right at the top of the skinny stalks that go straight up. They're a little over a foot tall. The stalks divide into two. And right at that division is where the flower grows from.

These plants clearly don't need a lot of light, and neither do the flowers. The flowers grow under these big leaves, and they droop down to point partially toward the ground. I had to get on my knees to take that first picture of the flower. I don't really like doing that. I like nature but I don't like getting my knees dirty.

Here's a top down view of the leaves of the plant. This is why the flower is not always noticeable. These leaves are about 10 inches/25 centimeters in diameter. Do you see the flower in this picture? Neither do I. I really never looked until this year.

Now you may be wondering what's up with the name of the plant. Why is it called Mayapple? For one thing, it is known to grow in the month of May. And that leads me to the next part of the name, the part with the apple in it. What apple would that be? I'm glad you asked. There is actually a small yellow fruit that grows from the flower a little bit later. That's where the name comes from. The fruit is edible, but the rest of the plant is toxic.

Here's a section of the forest where some of these plants grow. I find them all over the forest here. I also see a lot of them in the other forests that I visit. Some of them are so tall that you can easily see their flowers. But others hide their flowers very well.

I'm still not very good at identifying plants, but I can at least say that I'm learning very fast. It helps a lot when I have some of you who know about these things, and when the internet is such a rich source of information. All I had to do to identify these this time was to describe them the best I could in a Google search. I found them handily. It seems mayapple is a very well known plant.

I'll have to revisit the mayapple plant when the fruit grows on them. I'll share a bit more technical information when that time comes. But for now, I'll just share the attractive flowers above with you.