Gypsy moths causing locals much concern

By James Hanlon
Leader Staff Writer
Standing under an oak tree on Ray Rd., you can hear an uneasy crinkling in the canopy above. It’s the sound of thousands of gypsy moths wriggling through and devouring the foliage. Stand under there too long, and the larvae will fall on you.
“It’s raining caterpillars,” as Adam Bonislawski put it. “The moth problem is so bad that when you’re just going outside to your mailbox, you’re thinking it’s raining outside, but it’s not, it’s actually all the caterpillars falling from the canopies of the trees.”
A resident of Ray Rd. in Addison Township since 2006, this is the worst he’s ever seen it. The invasive species has completly bared over a dozen of his majestic oak trees. With their foliage gone, it looks like winter. They were fully green a month ago.

He worries he will lose some these trees he estimates are well over 100-years-old. “I can’t believe the county hasn’t done more to spray against them like they have in the past,” he said.
A few miles west, on Ray Rd. in Oxford, the sides of Rick Higginbotham’s house is covered with the two-inch creepy-crawlies, but that’s not the problem. “They don’t bother the house, because they can’t eat it.” His deck is covered in debris too, mostly tiny little pebbles he identifies as caterpillar feces. He cleaned his deck less than a week ago.
Most of all, he’s concerned about saving his trees. He has duct taped dozens of tree trunks treated with a layer of grease to prevent them from climbing. But that doesn’t stop those already above barrier from spreading tree-to-tree via overlapping canopies. “Last year, we had it semi bad. We got to watch out this year.”
There’s not much else he can do about it though. “People say, well it’s your land, it’s your problem. But what they don’t know is, yeah, it’s my land, my problem that I can’t fix because you have to have aerial spray to do it.”
And it’s not just his problem. The infestation will spread if it’s not brought under control. Already, he sees the direction it is spreading in his walks through the neighborhood, north up Delano Rd.
“When we went to the other side of Noble Road we saw their oak trees are starting to look like ours did last year. So, I think that’s where the problem is going to be next year (on top of what will already be just as bad along Ray Rd. because it hasn’t been handled yet). It’s going to be everyone’s problem,” he said.
In April, the Oxford Township Board voted to not participate in the 2021 Gypsy Moth Spraying program through the Macomb (not Oakland) County MSU Extension. The MSU program had conducted a survey of the township and identified 1,000 high-risk acres that would need to be sprayed. The township was quoted $140 per acre, which come to $140,000 total. In the future, in order to participate in the Gypsy Moth Spraying program a Special Assessment District will need to be established.
Addison Township, meanwhile, missed the opportunity to have a field study through the MSU program this year, but has included various links to MSU resources for residents on how to handle the moths.
In the meantime, neighbors are coordinating across township lines on a public Facebook group called Ray Rd Gypsy Moth Festival, and on the Leader’s FB page, to discuss the problem.
“Next season, whether the township helps us or not, we have to do something as a group.” Higginbotham said. He wants coordination between communities, ideally at the county level. “If it’s just one township or the other, the moths will come back in a few years.”