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Washington Grove girds for gypsy moths

Wood-eating caterpillars can weaken and kill trees, especially oaks

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

To a town defined largely by the canopies under whose tufts of healthy green foliage its residents reside, there are other, subtler nemeses than the rumble of looming deve.lopment.

Like the crawl of tree-hungry caterpillars.

While the small, Gaithersburg-area town of Washington Grove has not struggled as much lately with gypsy moths, the caterpillars that emerge each spring and call oak trees their favorite dish, some residents and leaders say they’re concerned that next year could be a different story.

A meager two inches long at full maturity, the moths are considered the most venerable of destructive forest pests in the region and have been known to infest hundreds of thousands of acres across the state, devouring enough leaves to strip trees and severely weaken — if not kill — them.

So to residents of a town whose very name suggests how revered are their shade trees, prospects that the insects might surge again next year has some concerned about potential damage and possible increased costs of spraying insecticides.

‘‘You can sit out there and feel it coming down on you,” said town resident Barbara Leng, describing what she says are the small, black droppings of gypsy moths that have been falling from an oak tree in her back yard. ‘‘We don’t feel comfortable having food out there at this point.”

Moth populations, a detriment to greenery throughout the Northeast, increased sharply statewide last year, and the numbers of egg masses found in yearly counts by experts have been low but steadily rising in recent years, according to the state Department of Agriculture, whose Forest Pest Management handles the insects.

The egg counts are done each fall to determine whether insecticide spraying might be needed the following year when they hatch around April, and while several counties in Maryland yielded high enough counts last year to require spraying this spring, Montgomery was not among them.

The Gaithersburg area saw its last major upsurge between 1988 and 1991, with a smaller jump occurring in 1995, said Tom Lupp, an entomologist with the state Department of Agriculture’s.

But while the outlook for the 2007 season won’t be known until this year’s egg mass counts are done, Washington Grove, which has had brushes with the moths, is taking no chances.

‘‘It’s not a good thing,” said Jim Fletcher, who handles maintenance for the town. ‘‘We have lost trees in the past to gypsy months.”

Leaders heeded the potential trouble by allotting $6,000 in the recently approved fiscal 2007 budget for spraying, though some say this may not be enough if next season is a bad one.

‘‘We’re thinking it’s probably going to be double that now,” said town Councilman Darrell Anderson, recalling that the costs to the town have gone up each of the four times they’ve paid for spraying.

Town treasurer Mary Charllstrom says Washington Grove paid $1,000 for spraying in 1986; $3,675 in 1988; $5,085 in 1989; and $5,610 in 1990 – the last time town dollars went toward battling the moths.

Lupp, of the state Department of Agriculture, says the town was mostly recently treated in 2000, when a state contractor sprayed.

But Challstrom says the town would have ‘‘elbow room” in the budget to cover any increased spraying costs if next season is ‘‘astronomical,” and that some of the cost to the town might be offset by any spraying done by the state.

Which would likely be of some comfort to Leng, the Washington Grove resident whose recent grappling with moth droppings have left her worried about what next year may bring.

‘‘This year’s been a big increase,” Leng said, referring to the moths she’s seen in the oak in her back yard — the one that ‘‘shades our whole house.”

‘‘That’s the one that’s been inundated.”