Gypsy Moth

LOCUST GROVE - There's a battle on South Mountain, but it isn't between Civil War armies. Rich Haden pulled a knife from his pocket and pierced one of the thousands of fuzzy caterpillars carpeting tree trunks along a more than two-mile stretch near the Appalachian Trail on South Mountain between Reno Monument and Locust Grove roads. Green "leaf juice" seeped from the wound. Haden and his friend Eric Garns thought the leaf-munching gypsy moth caterpillars were no longer a problem in Washington County, they said.

West Virginia landowners in the Eastern Panhandle are among those who can help the state fight gypsy moths, the state's No. 1 plant pest. This year's moth suppression program will accept egg mass survey applications from landowners in several counties, including Berkeley, Jefferson and Morgan counties in the Eastern Panhandle. The signup period runs from now through Aug. 31. The gypsy moth "eats a wide variety of trees and shrubs, and West Virginia's vast forest resources offer an ideal habitat for this invasive pest to feed upon," said Commissioner of Agriculture Gus R. Douglass.

Gypsy moths on the rebound Gypsy moth populations are on the rise in Washington County and officials at the Maryland Department of Agriculture are planning to spray nearly 700 acres of trees this spring before the insects take hold. An insecticide made partly from bacteria that occurs naturally in soils will be sprayed aerially around the second and third weeks of May on 673 acres at Chestnut Grove Park in the southern part of the county, and in the Mount Aetna area in the northern part, said Betsie Handley, regional entomologist with the Forest Pest Management section of the state Department of Agriculture.

By RICHARD F. BELISLE Staff Writer, Waynesboro The gypsy moth appears to have been brought under control, and scientists and foresters in the Tri-State area say there are a lot of reasons why their numbers have declined. "That's the $64 million question," said Robert Tichenor, head of Maryland's forest pest management division, of the reason for the dramatic reduction in gypsy moth populations in recent years. The voracious insects have chewed through millions of acres of forests in the Tri-State area since the early 1970s.