If you go into a deciduous forest these days, and listen, you will hear the strangely soft crunch of gypsy moth caterpillars decimating the green leaves.

There are so many of the critters, and they are eating at such a furious rate, that cars parked under infested trees get covered with caterpillar poop.

Turns out they’re especially fond of my young apple trees, and my new blueberry bush. They’re experts at reducing each leaf to lace. I don’t want to spray poisons in my yard, but I can’t let them ruin my fruit crop.

Incensed, I seized a bejeweled, fuzzy caterpillar and smushed it. It was a little gross, but then I did the same to another and another. It got easier.

Who knew that finding them and squishing them between my thumb and forefinger would become a serious addiction? The other day, before I knew it, I’d spent two hours finding and pinching their hairy little bodies.

They are good at abruptly dropping when they sense danger, but I’m getting equally good at cupping the other hand so that I can catch them in their quick descent.

It’s not a good idea to spend two hours with this kind of hyper-focus. When I went to bed after the day of the two-hour gig, visions of caterpillars of varying sizes kept wheeling through my head. I couldn’t get to sleep for ages. I told myself I was done. No more caterpillar search-and-destroy missions, but the next day I was at it again, obsessed.

This isn’t good, I told myself, and set the timer on my phone for 15 minutes. When it sounded, it was all I could do to drag myself away. My finger and thumb have a greenish, brownish cast. So do my nails. It’s pretty bad.

I told myself I would not bring out my kitchen stepstool, so as to reach higher branches with their fascinating caches of more worms. That resolve lasted five minutes. It was so absorbing reaching the next echelon of branches that I won’t say how long I studied each leaf and twig.

I told myself I absolutely would not carry the stepladder down to the apple trees and climb to the top of it in search of more prey. I would not. I did, of course. By now I was singing the suffragette song from Mary Poppins, with slight word changes, “Yes, I will kill you individually,” as I dispatched another 57, one by one.

What’s astonishing is how they just keep coming and how I am finding them everywhere. On my deck. Crawling up my front door. When I hike in the woods, there they are, chewing and chewing. Here, at least, I hope to achieve a bit more self control.

“NIMBY!” I muttered one morning as I tried to walk past one of those hideous tents of they make in the forks of trees. It was a mass of silk and undulating little bodies. “You are Not In My Back Yard,” I announced to them. “You are not my responsibility.”

I walked right on by. Then I pivoted, went back and scooped the entire wriggling mass into my hand, put it on a flat rock and mashed it beneath my boot.

Aahhh.

Dixie Brown is a writing coach at the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.