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return of the caterpillars
Monday, May 18 2026
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
Both dogs came with me when I took them on their afternoon walk at a little after 3:00pm. I was a little surprised that Neville came, given how much hotter the weather now was. (He tends to be more akin to a potato in such weather.) Things had changed dramatically in the forest since my last walk down the Gullies Trail last week. The new summerlike heat seemed to bring out all the caterpillars that have been devouring the trees for multiple summers in a row. Their little draglines were everywhere, catching me unpleasantly in the face or dragging across my naked torso as I walked. There was also frass and partially-eaten leaf fragments on the ground, none of which had been evident last week. As bad as they were, the caterpillars weren't as bad as they've been in previous seasons, probably because the predators who eat them have developed sizable populations of their own. I can hear the cuckoos up in the canopy (I know they love spongy moth caterpillars) and there are also a great many large black beetles scurrying around on the forest floor. I suspect they're that voracious caterpillar beetle that is benefitting from multiple simultaneous caterpillar infestations.
The dogs separated from me before I arrived at the mountain goat section of the Gullies Trail, so I went up to the Stick Trail and returned home on that. Charlotte returned home over an hour later, followed shortly by Neville, who was panting so laboriously that I poured some water on his back to cool him down.
This evening while Gretchen was off dining with Lynn, I finally buckled down and did some video editing with Kdenlive. It's not a fun or particularly well-developed program, and it's easy to get into maddening traps with it where a video clip in the "Project Bin" refuses to be placed on the timeline. Then there are issues with audio level and playback speed (in cases where you want to change those) where you are forced to do it by trial and error, as the labeling for the ranges of those things is hopelessly unintelligible. I understand that video editing is a complicated application, but when someone like me who is trying to do extremely basic stuff gets so flustered that I start posting questions in ALL-CAPS to ChatGPT, that's an indication that the application isn't ready for general use by the public. Despite this, I was eventually able to edit and export a video of Gretchen reading her poem "The Dogs and I Walked Our Woods," accompanied by clips of the cover of the collection it is in and of our dogs going down a trail. The audio was too quiet of course, because there is no relationship between how loud it is when editing and how loud it ends up in the export.
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