Yahoo Movies When you need to band your trees this year in Charlotte (some good news in 2020!)
This year has been so 2020 that even the cankerworms don’t want to be a part of it, apparently.
Charlotte has a history of battling the dreaded tiny green worms, the ones that jump into your hair and on your clothes each spring. The worms are the reason you have seen the unsightly tree bands every fall (mostly on oak trees).
The bands are intended to keep the worms from crawling into the trees in the fall, laying eggs in the canopies and then feasting on the leaves in the spring. “Some years the population was so large you could actually hear the munching,” TreesCharlotte posted recently.
And now, for some good news in a year that could use some good news: Local arborists and researchers have determined that you do not need to band your trees this year. That’s right, your willow oaks can ditch the gooey, sticky fall fashion they’ve been donning in past years.
Chris Diffley, a board certified master arborist and plant healthcare manager at Heartwood Tree Service, said despite the good news, some customers are choosing to band their trees anyway. “It’s a hard thing because people have been so well trained,” he said.
We saw this coming: The city tracks the number of cankerworms annually each spring at 163 locations. In April, CharlotteFive reporter Shawn Flynn reported a dramatic decrease in 2020:
2016: 38,948
2017: 32,434
2018: 4,963
2019: 184
2020: 117
Back in April, Laurie Dukes, assistant city arborist, told CharlotteFive that consecutive nights of hard freezes in back-to-back years may have killed the newly hatched caterpillers and the leaves they would have eaten.
Diffley said it’s difficult to say when they’ll reappear because the population is so temperature-dependent, but it’s generally about a 7- to 10-year cycle. “I’ve been here 15 years, and this is probably the lowest low we’ve ever seen,” he said.
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