The bugs should rise to the top if your yard has been infested. Mix soap with water and pour it over a small swathe of your lawn to check if there are caterpillars in your yard.Monitor your lawn regularly for patches of brown grass, tips of grass blades that have been eaten, and birds picking at your yard (birds love eating the worms, and patches of brown grass are one of the first signs of armyworm damage), Jeff Herman, editor-in-chief of the lawn-care company LawnStarter, told Insider.Here are some ways you can defend your property from these pests, according to an entomologist, a professor, and a representative from a lawn-care company.

The 1.5 inch-long caterpillars can devastate green fields of grass and crops quickly, and pesticides become ineffective once the worms are over a half-inch long, so it's critical to recognize and treat any infestation immediately. Though Kocher treated the inch-long worms in her yard with bottles of insecticides, she could still see the pests wriggling and flopping around when she was weeding, and when she mowed the lawn, a black slime splattered over her shoes - presumably the armyworms' pulverized bodies. Within two days of armyworms invading her yard, Julie Kocher's plush green lawn, which she said used to feel like a soft carpet to walk on, turned into a withered swathe of brown grass that looked like it had either caught on fire or hadn't been watered in weeks.Īrmyworms got their name from the way hordes of the insects infest and decimate green lawns and crop fields seemingly overnight - and the problem might be worse this year than any other in the past two decades, according to Michael Goatley, a Virginia Tech professor. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.

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