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Chris Latreille and his girlfriend were walking on the trails near Champlain Lookout in Gatineau Park Sunday and were astounded by the caterpillars, which were “literally raining down on us.”

“It was really crazy,” Latreille said. “It was OK at first. We just saw them on the ground, but as we got deeper into the trail there were webs across my face. All over my hands. In my eyes. You look up and you’d see five or six coming down at you. They were coming down like Spider-Man!”

Two species of tent caterpillar are found in the Ottawa area. The eastern tent caterpillar can be distinguished by the single, solid white down its back and the triangular silk “tents” it builds in the crooks of fruit trees. The forest tent caterpillar is identified by the dotted white line down its back. It doesn’t spin nests, but rather forms masses of several hundred caterpillars on the trunks of trees.

The caterpillars are voracious eaters, stripping leaves from a variety of trees, including poplar, birch, oak, maple and flowering fruit trees. The good news is the caterpillar is an early feeder, meaning many of the trees will be able to grow a second set of leaves later this spring.

“I live an hour west of Ottawa and they’re all around me. I’ve had them down my back,” said Rob Lee, a biologist and member of the Ottawa Field Naturalist Club who lives near White Lake.

“This won’t go on very long. They’re probably a week or two away from pupating and then they’ll become moths. They aren’t like gypsy moths that strip the trees later in the summer when they can’t recover. It’s a natural thing. It’s part of the forest.”