1922] Notes on Gypsy Moth in My Unsprayed Woods 215 



the first of July we had the bunches of caterpillars, with the 

 various enemies and disease, all working together making what 

 my wife called"a stinking mess". Then occurred a three days 

 storm and these messes were in spots a good deal broken up 

 and washed down. Most of the caterpillars had pupated and the 

 Calosoma seemed largely to have disappeared (I found one dead, 

 quarter grown) though some of the larger still showed, sucking 

 pupae which they continued to do until the moths began to 

 emerge about July 10th. By this time a great bulk of cater- 

 pillars and pupse along the trunks etc. had been killed, the former 

 showing partly as old skins and the latter as sucked and broken 

 shells, but there still remained thousands to hatch, especially 

 in the leafy bunches at the ends of the branches; with this hatch- 

 ing arrived our friends the birds. Our oaks were alive with 

 them, robins gulping down some whole and gathering bunches 

 in their mouths and carrying them off to their nests, kingbirds 

 swooping down and picking a male fluttering near the ground as 

 well as attending to the tops; several kinds of vireos, chicka- 

 dees, various kinds of sparrows and small birds, and last but 

 by no means least, a family of five young blackbirds with their 

 parents. The young were very amusing . They kept up a con- 

 tinual chatter, following up the old birds and begging for grub, 

 jostling each other and always all day long on the go. It would 

 seem that the position of a blackbird parent was no sinecure. 

 For two or three days this bird-fest kept up. It was a rare thing 

 thing to see a male gipsy on the wing. The females on the trunks 

 were not molested nearly as much, perhaps because they were 

 perfectly quiet, but the fluttering males, were everywhere gob- 

 bled up. As soon as the main moth emergence was over most of 

 the birds faded away and only a few remained to pick up strag- 

 glers. 



The females begin to lay eggs almost at once. On all egg 

 clusters that I have examined under the moth and before she 

 has dropped off are to be seen the egg parasite, (the imported 

 Japanese) the imago of which emerges this Fall, and which leaves 

 the egg cluster looking like a small pepper pot with its numerous 

 holes. 



