NASTY NEIGHBORS

Tent Caterpillars Trash Mountain Village Landscape

By David Frey, 6-19-06

Usually Mountain Village, the second-home enclave above Telluride, gets a bad rap for all the residents who don’t really live there. They just drop by for awhile, then leave the place a gazillionaire’s ghost town. But now, Mountain Village is suffering from a bunch of residents who moved in, trashed the place and left.

These short-timers aren’t your typical resort second-homeowners, though. They live in tents, wreak havoc on the landscape, then take off. And, they have about 100 legs.

They are tent caterpillars, and after four straight years of infesting aspen trees and leaving them bare, entomologists worried the damage could kill the trees.

"I had never seen anything like it in all my life," Mountain Village Police Department Investigator Robert Walraven told the Denver Post. "It reminded me of some kind of plague. You couldn't even walk anywhere without stepping all over them."

Reporter Nancy Lofholm writes that the infestation isn’t exactly out of the ordinary. The fuzzy, black-and-yellow critters are long-time Westerners that munch on new buds and build their tents in the trees, and eventually take wing as moths. But while such invasions may happen from time to time, they don’t always happen here, amid the landscapes that justify the multi-million-dollar price tags of nearby Mountain Village homes.

So local officials called in the big guns. They brought in a spray plane that doused the area with bacteria that entomologists said would paralyze the tiny caterpillar intestines but leave the humans unharmed. The caterpillars are gone now, mostly, but they’ve left behind their gauzy cocoons and a lot of bare aspen branches.
"They seem to be under control now," said Town Manager Kathy Mahoney. "The millions and millions crawling around here seem mostly to have vanished."

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