Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Good News, Bad News

When I was retrieving the camera card from the trail cam out by the Back Bubbler, I noticed this:


A dead Spotted Lanternfly. Good I thought, better dead than alive.

The next time I found tw:


A few days later I took this picture:


There are at least nine dead Lanternflies in the image (and a dead grasshopper). I counted a total nineteen of them in and immediately around the Back Bubbler.

Still good that they were dead, but a bit troubling that three were so many. And I wondered, where were they coming from?

This is where:


I found another thirty or so on the Willow tree over the Bubbler, three of which can be see in the image above. As it was a cold morning (in the low 30's F) I was able to kill them all. And I've been killing a couple a day since.

So that's the good news, many dead Lanternflies.

The bad news? That there were so many to kill. That does not bode well for the upcoming spring.

And I'm only finding these because I had a reason to go to this tree. How many other trees are there in the forest about our place infested like this that I do not know about?

I'm sure we'll find out next year. 

Really bad news to come methinks.

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