Earlier this evening I went across to get Benjamin, my neighbour, to help me lift three heavy kitchen worktops off the roof of my car. They are for my friend Val who lives down in the Aude, but as she’s in England at the moment, I picked them up from Leroy Merlin in Chancelade and will look after them until she returns. On my way over to Benjamin and Aurelie’s house, I shone my torch up into one of the pine trees where the ‘Processionnaires’ have their nests and this is what I saw.
The picture shows just one of the nests and isn’t of very good quality because I had to take it from the ground using flash, but all of the nests that I could see were showing the same level of activity ie there were literally hundreds of caterpillars out in the trees gnawing on the pine needles. Here are another couple of shots taken with a bit of zoom to bring the caterpillars closer and although they are also of poor quality, they give an idea of their colours that I described in my last posting.
I showed them to Benjamin on the way back to my place and he wondered if he ought to cut down all the branches with the nests on, but I said that he probably wouldn’t be able to, as there are so many and in any case, several are very high up in the trees. I said that the best thing would be to keep an eye out for the caterpillars when they come down to ground level and ensure that Samuel, their new baby son, is kept well away from them.
Also Scratchie, their one remaining cat, but that’s another story. We’re all getting a bit worried about him because I was the last person to see him and that was a week or more ago. We’re hoping that he hasn’t suffered the same fate as poor Mouchou and keeping our fingers crossed for now. I hope that he turns up soon as it would be awful to lose all of the three pets we had between us in such a short space of time 🙁
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