Extension News: August 2010 Archives

Tomato hornworm: the very name sends shudders down the spines of home gardeners, many of whom have nightmares of the green caterpillars doubling, tripling, and quadrupling in size before their despairing eyes. We can barely say the name without cringing.

The tomato hornworm is a voracious eating machine, bent on devouring your precious tomato plants (and sometimes the tomato’s close relatives: potatoes, peppers, eggplants). Its life begins innocently enough with a single, pearly egg laid on the underside (or sometimes the upper surface) of a leaf. So tiny, but a single, poppy-seed-sized ovum holds the potential to completely defoliate a tomato plant in short order.

The egg hatches into a small, translucent larva with a long, odd-looking appendage the horn on its rear end. As it matures and fills up on your tomato foliage, the caterpillar “greens up.”

How much damage could such a delicate creature possibly do? If you find and remove one at an early stage, the damage is minimal. Ah, but their camouflage becomes so perfect that you don’t usually find the caterpillars early. Oh, no, one will have chomped through half a plant before you notice something is amiss.

You walk out to check your tomato plants and realize that one stem has no leaves on it. Now, isn’t that odd? Some or all of the ripening fruit may be damaged, and even the very end of the stem is gone.

Now you’ll need to settle down for a long search. That is, if you can even find the caterpillars. Their coloring, shape, and posture blend in so well, it’s easy to overlook a few. Many times I’ve searched and destroyed, sure that not one was overlooked. The next day, I find more! Where were they hiding? Sometimes one will curl up its front end and then it looks just like a young leaf, wrinkled and not yet open. The cleverness of their disguise is a marvel of adaptation.

You’ll need to turn over every leaf on the plant, exploring each surface carefully for the green larvae with a horn on one end and five pairs of prolegs. Short white stripes run up the sides. Beady eyes stare out at you and the jaws never stop chewing. (Consider wearing gloves! Those jaws are not averse to nipping at the hand that grabs, though they can’t really “bite,” pinch, or cause you any harm.)

If you’re lucky, you’ll find a hornworm with lots of white egg-like appendages strung out along the back. Don’t kill this one! It’s been infected by a tiny parasitic wasp that deposited her eggs just under the caterpillar’s skin. When the eggs hatch, the wasp larvae proceed to devour the hornworm’s innards. (No one ever said Nature was kind.)

When ready to pupate, the wasp larvae poke up through the caterpillar’s skin and spin their cocoons, the white protrusions you see on an infected hornworm’s back. The hornworm soon dies and the wasps emerge from their cocoons, ready to fly away and begin the cycle again.

Eventually, hornworm monsters become so big up to five inches long they can’t be overlooked. Their obesity means that the stem can no longer screen them from view. Besides, by this point they have eaten every leaf on the plant. There’s no where else to hide.

So, it’s time for the next stage in the insect’s metamorphosis. The caterpillars drop to the ground and wander to a spot where they can burrow several inches deep and create a chamber for themselves. They pupate there, forming a long, brown cylinder where they overwinter, safe from predators, cozy in the soil of your garden.

In mid to late spring the adults emerge as sphinx moths, and if you thought the larvae were big, you should you see the moths they become! If you’ve ever admired a hummingbird moth or a lunar moth, double the size of one and you’ll understand what I mean. I found one once, on the side of a bean plant. I thought it was a bat until it flew away. Add in a heavy body to match the five-inch wingspan, and you have one huge moth.

Like most moths, they’re nocturnal and they can travel long distances, flying in at night and locating your plants by smell.

So, there you have it: the life story of one of the home gardener’s most dreaded pests. There are actually quite a few species of hornworms, but only two, the tomato hornworm and the tobacco hornworm (almost-look-alikes, except the tobacco hornworm sports a red horn and the tomato hornworm usually has a black horn)  come into our vegetable gardens and devour our tomatoes. They’re enough to make me hate the color green.

By Susan M. Poirier, Master Gardener

We stared at each other in mutual surprise, unmoving, unblinking. I almost said, “Do you wanna dance?” in the way of two people trying to maneuver around each other in close quarters.

We were 20 feet apart, but it suddenly seemed like a very small space. Her stare unnerved me. I took a step back into the doorway I had just exited she took a corresponding step back the reluctant choreography of unwilling dance partners.

In her bold stare I saw many faces: menacing hunter, consumer of small pets and carrion, scavenger of trash bins, popular cartoon character, trickster god. Her head came up, the yellow eyes blinked, a sideways glance and she melted back into the woods. I resumed breathing.

I had seen coyotes up close before, many times in fact during the 20 years I lived in southern California. Most of that sprawling metropolis has been so recently carved out of the wilderness that many of its original inhabitants are still there: bobcats, mountain lions, wild boar, and coyotes still prowl their home territories, wondering what happened to their hunting grounds and denning sites. As in New Hampshire, the number of human/wildlife interactions is on the increase, sometimes with unfortunate results for both parties.

Even in midsummer when it has finished shedding, the Eastern coyote that calls New Hampshire home is larger and fuller coated than its western cousin. Those I saw in California were a faded tawny-gray, a body that appeared half-starved on top of too long legs nothing like my sleek visitor with her vibrant reddish fur and confident stance, muscley-lean with a calm but feral look.

Coyotes invariably evoke an emotional response fear, excitement, wonder, disdain. In my New England childhood, they were the stuff of Indian legends and stories of the Wild West. There may be no other animal the subject of as many legends, from Abenaki to Navajo, from Miwok to the Crow nation. Coyotes are portrayed as cunning and subversive, tricksters, sometimes thieves or clowns, sometimes Promethean, bringing the gift of fire to mankind.

They are opportunistic and adaptive, learning to live in Central Park as well as the north woods and in our own backyards. They don’t fear our presence in their territory as much as they exploit it. The state of New Hampshire has declared year round open season on coyotes, but biologists say that will probably have little effect on their numbers.

Early this summer, as I took a break from long hours of weeding, a flurry of movement in the field across the road caught my attention. A flock of turkeys was executing a series of frantic evasion maneuvers, running first this way then that, in perfect formation, a large coyote close on their heels (or claws as it were). They ran as a unit with that queer bird communication that enables a flock of doves to dip and swirl in faultless symmetry in the perfect blue sky over a summer wedding.  “Scatter, you fools,” I hissed. Not that I'm any particular fan of turkeys who frequently visit my blueberry bushes. “Scatter!”

Suddenly, as if a grenade had been launched in their midst, they did exactly that each bird becoming clumsily airborne in a different direction , leaving the coyote to spin a quick circle of indecision before trotting off to the pasture edge. They will live to gorge themselves on more blueberries, I thought.

On a cold February night, when the temperature is so frigid you can barely stand to open your back door, you will hear the howling of coyotes courting off in the woods. Or on a quiet summer evening, when the moon is just beginning to glow on the horizon and adult coyotes are teaching their young to hunt, the tranquility will be shattered by a chorus of yips and howls that seem to come from a hundred snarling mouths the primal sound of a pack on the hunt.

You briefly speculate on which tiny creature is about to meet its demise, and even if you have never spent a single night in the open, you wonder how it would feel at that moment to be sleeping by a dying campfire deep in the forest. You wonder if the coyotes are gathering in some moonlit hollow, just out of sight, dancing.

By Lynne Lawrence, Master Gardener

The 2009-2010 school year was coming to a rapid close. Teachers were reflecting on student performance and their own learning experiences with UBD, IB, COF, NECAPS, and NEWAS. There’s always a new buzzword in education, but on a particular day in late May at Webster Elementary, the word came to life.

Folks in northern New England were enduring unseasonably hot temperatures. The school children were already telling stories of swimming in back yard pools and nearby ponds. Recess duty on that day would involve the challenges of keeping the youngsters healthy and hydrated.

In hopes of catching an outdoor breeze and escape the oppressive heat in the building, one staff member had stepped outside, then hurried back inside to find the school nurse (me). The students would soon be running out to the playground, and she was concerned about a strange noise on the school property she thought might have a safety impact on recess.

The staff member and I cautiously made our way toward the sound, a loud buzzing just outside the door. Several yards from our vantage point, we could see a huge cloud of flying insects at least 20 feet up high and half way between a big tree and the playground. We agreed we needed to do something immediately.

I rushed back into the building to make a general announcement that the children would have to stay inside for recess. Within a few moments the bell would have sent the children out, running directly into the path of the unidentified flying insects.

Listening to the disappointed voices of children reverberating through the halls, I contacted the district maintenance supervisor to ask for help.

“How many insects?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “A lot.”

“More than 25 to 50? We need to assess before we can make a plan.”

“A lot more than 50. Thousands!” I said.

“We’ll be on it as soon as possible.”
After the maintenance crew arrived and proclaimed their suspicions that the cloud was actually a giant swarm of honeybees, my fears escalated. I worried about the dangers of multiple bee stings and the life-threatening circumstances that could prove deadly.

How does an emergency management team prepare for dozens of victims of anaphylactic shock? My imagination ran wild. But in reality, the children were safe inside the building.

To the onlookers’ surprise, the cloud dissipated and settled as a large brown mass within the tree branches. One brave teacher was able to photograph the site to validate the incident.

I soon received a call from the district facilities manager. “I’ve been thinking about this. I’m gonna go over to Larry Boucher’s house, see if Larry can positively identify and capture the insects,” he said.

Larry, a retired teacher and longtime beekeeper, has run a bee club at Merrimack Valley Middle School for 10 years. When he arrived, he estimated that about 25, 000 bees occupied the low tree branch­one of the biggest honeybee swarms he’d ever seen. It was shaped a little like a hot pepper about two feet long, about 45 inches in circumference at the top and 12 inches at the bottom. Larry said that with no nest or food stores to defend, the bees were clustered in a resting, non-aggressive mode.

We watched anxiously as Larry pulled his pick-up truck right up under the branch where the swarm had landed, then shook the branch so most of the bees fell into a “hive body” baited with honey. He put his bee suit on so he could confirm that the queen had gone into the box to take command of the hive and ensure the other bees would stay there.

When it was evident that most of the swarm was encased in the box, and Larry announced he was “pretty darn sure” the queen was in there, too, we all breathed a sigh of relief.

I was very grateful for the “bee whisperer” in our midst, grateful for everyone’s safety, grateful I didn’t have to deal with a health emergency, and grateful we didn’t have to hire an exterminator. The recent and ongoing die-off of honeybees that pollinate our flowers and food crops makes it all the more important that the swarm of beneficial insects was preserved.

Larry said the queen could have left her pheromones behind in the tree, so he cut and disposed of many branches to prevent more bees from congregating at the site. Caution tape secured an area of the playground for a few days, and the last of the homeless bees few away in search of a new home.

The children may have missed outside recess that day, but the bees surely got theirs during a visit we’re still buzzing about.

by Judy Elliott, UNH Cooperative Extension NH Outside volunteer

drawing by, Pamela Doherty, UNH Cooperative Extension

It was a beautiful late spring day when my husband, Jay, ventured out for a round of golf. He decided to play a New Hampshire course he’d never played before but had heard was good. Placed with a threesome of thirty-somethings, he immediately struck up a conversation about the course (the others had played it several times) and the hazards that lay ahead.

At the 10th hole each of the players teed off, the best golfer of the four hitting long and straight down the middle of the fairway. Two of the others hooked the ball to the left and my husband’s ball, though straight to begin with, hit the fairway and rolled off to the right near the woods. Disappointed with the result, he was searching for his ball near some bushes when he heard a strange sound coming from the underbrush, but chose to ignore it.

After locating his ball near the base of a tree, he lined up to examine the best possible angle for his shot when, again, he heard the sound and, out of the corner of his eye, saw some movement in the bushes. Looking up he spotted what he later described as one of the biggest wild turkeys he’d ever seen. “Holy cow! That’s one big bird!” he heard his companions exclaim from some 30 yards away.

Without taking his eyes off the turkey, Jay began to back off slowly. The bird took this as a signal to advance­slowly. My husband moved slightly to the left. The bird mirrored his movement. Jay stepped to the right. The turkey did the same. Then, without warning, the turkey took flight directly at Jay’s face. As he fell flat on his back, he remembered thinking, “Turkeys don’t attack people.”

Scrambling quickly to his feet he began to “dance” with the bird while holding his nine iron out in front of him to keep the bird at bay. They made a full 360-degree turn before the turkey retreated to the woods. The other golfers rushed in, incredulous.

Jay pulled himself together and set up, once again, to take his shot. “Hold on, Jay,” one of the guys said. “It’s coming at you again.”

Sure enough, the turkey wasn’t finished. Poking its head out of the tall grass, it glared at the players and flapped its wings as warning, then retreated after having the last word.

“Just take the shot, Jay. I got your back,” one of the guys said, placing himself between my husband and the woods. Jay duffed the shot but got it far enough away to feel safe from attack, and so the round continued.

Throughout the next eight holes the conversation rarely deviated from “turkey talk” and how bizarre the incident had been. Speculation as to why a normally shy bird would do such a thing ranged from thinking that it must have been a female protecting her family, to maybe it was simply nuts.

When we first moved to New Hampshire the natives told us we’d be lucky to ever see a wild turkey, and we found that to be true. As the years passed however, we’ve seen more and more of them, and now they strut through our yard on a regular basis.

Speaking with N.H. Fish and Game wildlife biologist Ted Walski, I learned why: Wild turkeys became extinct in New Hampshire in the mid 1850s due to habitat loss and over-hunting. But the department began restocking them in the 1970s, and the wild turkey population has expanded to around 35,000 statewide.

According to Walski, sometimes Tom turkeys will get into breeding mode during mating season and “forget themselves,” attacking a human­especially if the person is wearing bright colors. The hen turkeys will protect their young from anyone who gets too close.

After looking at a drawing of a hen and tom turkey, my husband said the turkey that flew at him was probably a female. So perhaps the lesson here is to keep your distance from turkeys, especially in the spring, when the birds are mating, nesting, and rearing young.

The day after the golf incident I was awakened at 5 a.m. by a loud gobbling outside and went to the window to see what the noise was about. There, strolling down our street was a huge Tom turkey, gobbling nonstop in full voice to the female turkey in front of him.

Another state wildlife biologist told my editor that the “turkey talk” was just the tom trying to persuade the female to mate with him. “That’s pretty much all they do,” the biologist said. “After the mating season, Tom Turkey retires to the couch with a beer to watch the ballgame and leaves the rest of the work­incubating the eggs and raising the young­to the hens.”

By Susan Ferber, Master Gardener
UNH Cooperative Extension

The room was pitch black as I lay in bed searching the darkness outside my window for the momentary flash of light. As a child, my excitement at seeing the first fireflies of summer rivaled the anticipation of waiting for Santa or the thrill of waking up to the first snow of the season.

Now, each year I am transported back to my childhood when I first spy lightning bugs gracefully dancing in the darkness of the backyard.

It never ceases to amaze me, that split-second burst of brilliance in which I think my eyes are playing tricks on me. I stop, stand stock-still, and wait for the next twinkle, then another over by the edge of the lawn and yet another higher up near the first flash.

My heart soars, and I run inside to alert my family and insist that, they too, come to watch the show. To me it’s as impressive as the Perseid meteor showers that we watch from our roof, because these lights are alive and that seems even more special.

As children, we spent most of June and July with our maternal grandparents. It was our favorite time of year, filled with the freedom that only comes when you’re young and the summer promises to last forever.

My two older sisters took special delight in the pursuit of fireflies on balmy June evenings, carefully capturing them in a jar with tiny holes poked in the lid. Once they’d collected enough flies, they would silently sneak upstairs to my grandparent’s bedroom. Gently they would slip their jars under the light summer sheets and unscrew the tops, releasing the bugs. Then they would turn off the lights and watch as the sheets lit up in a beautiful ever-changing light pattern.

Racing back to their own bed, they would huddle together and attempt to stifle their giggles when my grandparents discovered the “gift” my sisters had left them. Leaving their windows open usually meant that more mosquitoes entered than fireflies escaped.

Bioluminescence is the name scientists give to the ability of living creatures to use body chemistry to produce and emit light. There are two critical purposes behind the firefly light show. Fireflies (actually beetles in one of several genera) use their tail lights, or lanterns, to attract mates and to lure prey. Flashing in their society isn't only encouraged, but necessary for survival.

Males and females identify each other by the timing of their flashes. The flash pattern differs for each species, allowing members of that species to recognize each other. However, females of the genus Photurus have evolved the ability to imitate the flash patterns of female Photinus (another genus of firefly), to attract Photinus males, whereupon she attacks and eats them. Because of this deceptive ability, Photurus females are often described as the femme fatales of the firefly domain.

By consuming a male Photinus, the female Photurus firefly gains both the nutrition from her prey's body and certain compounds (lucibufagins) it contains, which make her unappealing to certain predators such as the Phidippus jumping spider.

With such great survival mechanisms, you’d think lightning bugs would outlast us all, but I’ve noticed fewer and fewer lightning bugs in my yard over the years. Scientists are concerned about this, too, and their research reveals light pollution as one reason behind their disappearance.

It seems artificial light we produce outside our homes at night confuses the fireflies and shuts them down. When they can’t tell day from night they tend to keep their lanterns off. When they stop flashing, the beetles aren’t attracting mates or their much-needed food sources.

Sadly, scientists predict that in certain parts of the country, lightning bugs may be gone in as little as a decade. One simple solution is to cut down on light pollution-but urban sprawl shows no signs of reversing itself.

Still, if you’re fortunate enough to live away from urban bright lights, try turning off your own outdoor lights. You’ll save money and reduce your carbon footprint. Then, when the weather turns warm, turn off your indoor lights, too, take a seat by the window and be patient. With luck, you’ll be rewarded with a beautiful light show that may transport you back.

By: Susan Ferber, Master Gardener