Attack of the webworms!

I meant to post this a while back and never got around to it. The webworms have since subsided with the colder weather, but they completely devoured a walnut tree in a neighboring backyard.

Notice the lack of greenery? The webworms ate it all and left behind their nasty webs. So what is a webworm, you ask? Well... they look like this:

Kinda cute until thousands of them are crawling through your backyard. Their nests look like this but worse:

I couldn't find a picture that really captures the beauty of the sun shining through a webby structure filled with squirming caterpillars.

So between myself and several neighbors we researched the web (no pun intended), made phone calls to everyone we could think of, and found out that there's almost nothing you can do about these nasty creatures except pull them down in their webs with a stick and burn them, which we did as much as possible. The birds ate a lot of them too I think...

So disgusting.