If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that I enjoy walking outside and taking pictures of Nature. This has been a bad year for that, though. First we had a harsh winter with too much snow, which made walking outside a chore. Then came a depressing spring. The violets put on a lackluster display. The bees did not show up to pollinate them.
What did show up were the winter moth caterpillars. They arrived in astonishing numbers and they decimated the trees. Just as the trees were trying to recover by putting out a second flush of leaves, dry conditions and an unexpected infestation of gypsy moth caterpillars hit them. This is the worst gypsy moth infestation since the ’80s. That’s not just my opinion. I looked up gypsy moth numbers in Rhode Island, and yeah, they’re very high, and my town was apparently one of the hardest hit.
All of this has been hard to witness. There is nothing I can do to change it. If I go outside, I see struggling trees and gypsy moths everywhere I look. It makes me sad. And I recently read that the Asian longhorn beetle and the emerald ash borer are slowly making their way toward us. Great. That’s just what we need–more invasive, tree-killing species.
But dwelling on the negative is not good for me. I’ve taken a lot of pictures of what I’ve seen (both good and bad) over the last few months. I haven’t found the spirit to write about them yet, but I am going to push myself to get that done. Maybe by writing about the bad things I can stop thinking about them. And maybe I can find some bright side, too.
Expect to see those posts soon.