Wormss

I found these worms on my red oak.....what are they....I disposed of them......

Looks like tent caterpillars to me. I'd have done the same.

Eewie! That was one big mess of destruction just waiting to happen!! Good call!

Definitely tent caterpillars. We have them at the cottage and they are there every year, but they go in 7-year cycles. That is, they build up in number and the seventh year they're all over the place, hundreds of tents, and the next year almost none. Then they build up over the next years... and on it goes. They can do a lot of damage.

Sometimes I just prune off the tent if it's on a wild shrub (they love fruit trees and shrubs, like apple and chokecherry). I have also gone at them with a propane torch. I prefer not to use pesticides, but BT would probably work. You can also spray with dormant oil/lime sulfur in the early spring before buds swell and eggs hatch.

They build their tents in a crotch and then demolish the leaves all around it. Birds are a natural predator.

I remember one year they were so thick here in town they were all over the driveway and the streets, and cars left tracks of gooey squished caterpillars. It was a challenge avoiding them on the sidewalk. Walking on them on the lawn or in the woods in bare feet was no fun either, but we were kids then, time for a wade in the lake!

I remember that outbreak in the 70's. You could go in the woods and hear them all defacating there were so many of them. Yuckola.

I am no expert on these ickies, but we have tent worms here and they are in little tents, come out during the day and eat the leaves. They tend to favor sweet trees like fruit. This worm here looks like it could be gypsy moth, which is also a probem here. They tend to go for the oak trees and mass on trunks like this one. The way we got them is arial spraying. This made a huge difference.
Tent worms are a yearly problem for us, and I too like to use the blow torch. It works well, no chemicals and I know they are dead. You just have to be careful with dry leaves and the falling sparks, also you need to torch the "seed pods" on the branches that holds the eggs.
I think this picture may be of gypsy moths.

Gypsy moth caterpillars are shorter and fatter, and have little tufts of hairs at the front and back (so predators can't tell which way is the front). And I've never seen them congregate in bunches the way tent caterpillars do, as shown in the picture, but I guess you have, chick. There was a terrible GM infestation about 50 km west of here in the early 1990s, defoliating whole forests several years in a row, but they didn't get bad in our area.

Yeah, I didn't know how to tell the difference in the worm itself, but ours did look like this on an oak. When I see the tent worms they are either in the nest or scattered, and never on an oak. I am sure everyone is right. They need to be gone irregardless. We have many different birds here and I have never seen any eat these nasty things. I heard opening the nests help birds to find them. no. I heard that opening the nests will make them freeze at night, no. The blow torch works the best. We have lots of nice cherry wood to cook over because of these pests, but I would like some of the wild cherry trees to live.