1922] Notes on Gypsy Moth in My U ns prayed 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 pupae 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. 
