230 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



Appendix. 



STATEMENTS FROM EYE-WITNESSES OF THE RAVAGES 

 OF THE GYPSY MOTH. 



Statement of Mrs. Thomas F. Mayo, 25 Myrtle Street, 

 Medford, Mass. 



We had three apple trees, four pear trees, one plum tree and one 

 mountain ash killed by the gypsy moth caterpillars. These trees 

 were stripped of their foliage in the summer of 1887. They began 

 to leaf out again late in the season, but were immediately stripped. 

 The apple trees also put forth a few blossoms at this time. The 

 following year they did not leaf out at all. They all died, and we 

 cut them down. The apple trees were good-sized trees. One was a 

 spice greening, another a Porter and a third an August sweeting. 

 We also cut down a little locust tree which was badly eaten by the 

 caterpillars and the limbs of which died. The caterpillars swarmed 

 in a tall Norway spruce iu our back yard. They ate every bit of 

 foliage on this tree, so that we had to cut all the limbs off. Nothing 

 but the pole of this tree remains in our yard to-day. This tree was 

 so full of caterpillars that when I shook a limb with a rake they 

 would fall off in a shower and blacken the ground. There were so 

 many of them that it sounded like pebbles falling. In addition to 

 the trees our currant bushes were stripped by the pest. The cater- 

 pillars were worst in 1887, 1888 and 1889. In the summers of those 

 years a good portion of my time was occupied in fighting the pest. 

 The two large elms in front of our house were full of caterpillars, 

 and had not a perfect leaf. In the night-time the noise of the worms 

 eating in the trees sounded like two sticks grating against each other. 

 In the months of July and August I have gone out in the morning 

 and raked up from under the elms a pile of leaves three or four feet 

 high. These leaves had been cut off by the caterpillars, and usually 

 there was a worm on the underside of every leaf. I would pour 

 kerosene over the mass and set it on fire, and the squirming of the 

 caterpillars would cause it to rise up as if it had life of its own. 

 The catei-pillars used to cover the basement and clapboards of the 

 house as high as the window sill. They lay in a solid black mass. 

 I would scrape them off into an old dish pau holding about ten quarts. 



