The town of Ledyard is debating the creepy, crawly issue of what to do about its gypsy moths.
After spending the last two years fighting what some describe as an outbreak of the bugs that devour tree leaves and lay eggs that transform into sticky caterpillars, residents said they’re tired of the nuisance.
“We’ve never seen anything as bad as this. The trees, many leaves were just taken down,” Kathy Capon, of Ledyard, said. “The moths were on the ground. They were on the house, on the gutters -- climbing everywhere. It was terrible,” she said.
Naomi Rodriguez, president of a local homeowners association, will be going before the town’s land use and planning committee to make the case that an aerial spraying company be brought in to spray the moth eggs that are in the trees to prevent a new round of moths next spring.
Rodriguez said the moths also cause health and safety issues. They can make trees unsteady through their defoliation, which she said could put the entire community in danger.
“If you have a dead or weakened tree and you get a strong wind, or blizzard or snowstorm, that tree is going to fall,” she said. “Our worry is that it is going to fall on one of our children.”
The town sprayed for a similar infestation in the 1980s.
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Chuck Rupee was president of the HOA then and said the spraying was a huge success, which is why he supports doing it again now that the moths are back.
“The spraying that we did totally interrupted that cycle. We had almost 20 years without gypsy moths,” he said.
The land use committee will make a recommendation to the town council about whether to spray and the town council while decided whether to move forward or open the question up for public debate.
