More about the Ghostly Park

I was mentioning my experience to my 8 year old grandson, Samuel, when he excitedly told me that he had seen the same thing on one tree in his garden. He is very keen on insects, etc. So we decided to investigate.

The large tree by the gate was showing the first signs of what I had seen at the Ainola Museum Park. We decided to take some photographs. Again, I must apologise for the quality of the photographs. Samuel took most of them with my digital camera.

The first picture is a couple of cocoons, one closed and the other open, as they had dropped onto the windshield of the car when we had a bit of rain the previous night. The leaves seen in the background are a reflection in the glass window of the car.

Cocoons, one closed, one open

Here is a shot of the caterpillar.


Destructive caterpillar

The moths that develop are seen in the next two photographs.


Moth sitting on the car


Moth under a leaf

The next shot shows the encasing process of the leaves by the caterpillars. See the two moths sitting under the leaves on the left.


Encasing of the leaves in progress

And this shot shows the leaf section fully encased and destroyed.


Leaves bundle totally suffocated after having been consumed by the caterpillar

At Joanna and Tony's house they have only one tree of this type. It is not Pine or Birch, but something known as "Tuomi" in Finnish, called "Bird Cherry" in English. This one has not been fully destroyed by the caterpillar / moth invasion. There are patches here and there of the destruction. Samuel and I are watching this process and have been fascinated. I have taken moths, caterpillars, cocoons and leaves in a glass bottle, which now sits on my office table. The caterpillars have turned into moths this evening.

I was not the only person to be scared out of my wits. In the Reader's Comments Section in our daily newspaper, today, there was an SMS text message expressing exactly what I said on the blog and it was signed "Frightened Tourist"!!