Tuesday was an almost perfect spring morning: cool, sun coming up and spring flowers ablaze. As I relished a morning walk about 4 miles south of uptown, I also relished something perhaps more gruesome. I gleefully squished dozens of green cankerworms that had fallen onto the street during Monday’s rain.

April in Charlotte is a time of beauty, but the beauty is infested with thousands of little beasts – cankerworms. Like the green pollen coating your car, cankerworms are a significant annoyance even when dogwoods are in gloom, azaleas pop with color and early irises inch open. Don’t know about cankerworms? You may not be from around here. If you think they are cute little inchworms, think again.

Cankerworms, officially known as fall cankerworms or Alsophila pometaria, have been devouring the early spring leaves of Charlotte’s willow oaks, dogwoods and maples for more than 25 years. Their appetite is so rapacious that a serious infestation can all but defoliate not just a struggling young dogwood but a mature oak. I know this because I have seen it happen in our yard, year after year. Not only do the worms float down on silken threads onto people’s heads, shoulders and clothing, their poppyseed-like excrement can be found on pavement and cars, along with the green pollen. City arborist Don McSween has been fighting Charlotte’s cankerworms for 25 years. This year, however, for the first time in several decades, he may have found a cankerworm enemy – the fiery searcher beetle, Calosoma scrutator, a native beetle that has begun showing up in Charlotte in unusual numbers and which dines on caterpillars, including fall cankerworms.