We do have a slight problem with tent worms and cankerworms here in GA, nasty little buggers:
http://www.insectimages.org/images/768×512/2733040.jpg
http://www.sciencepunk.com/v5/gallery/webtree.jpg

Ever seen The Mist? You wake up one balmy summer morning like any other, step outside for the sunrise, and all you can see is rotting horror. Not only are there dead cutworms everywhere (in the grass, in the AC unit, in the cracks of your car’s side mirrors), but that rice-crispies sound that lulled you to sleep the night before was the rolling death machine that erased every last scrap of plant life in the area. Freaky, football-sized cocoons of grey silk are stuck in between the tree limbs, hanging from branches, car bumpers, telephone wires and lawn jockeys. And they’re all _moving_ inside. The big cocoons kinda shudder and twitch like the ones in Gremlins, and all the trees are stark and sticky. To top it off, the cocoons are loose and fluid, wrapped around their moorings in a chaotic kind of way that looks more like a giant spider infestation than any kind of moth.
http://www.bugwood.org/PAT/pics/11-10.jpg
http://www.bugwood.org/PAT/pics/11-6.jpg
http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/mecklenburg/depts/hort/john/insects/cankerworm/tent1.jpg
http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/mecklenburg/depts/hort/john/insects/cankerworm/webworm1.jpg

Really interesting colors on that caterpillar, it’s like the Chinese turquoise that has brown veining instead of black.

Years ago I was explaining to my wife the basic classification of trees. “These trees are all coniferous,” I said, “while those trees are–”

She interrupted me.

“Herbiferous?”

And there you have it. Since then, in my family, trees are classified as “Herbiferous”, meaning a tree that eats herbs¹ and “Carniferous”, meaning trees that eat other trees.

¹ Later we upgraded herbifery to include the occasional squirrel, because out here in Utah you typically only see squirrels in the evergreens. We haven’t actually seen it, but we presume from the evidence that there is clearly tree-on-squirrel predation going on.

Then I moved on to the comments, and tciesle completely blew me away with his horror story of infestation. That’s absolutely amazing, and I agree: If there is more to tell, tell it!

Yeah, I was that kid at scout camp….

We had a massive infestation of a related species some years ago, and it was pretty appalling - they completely defoliated practically every tree for miles around. Walking in the woods, there were hordes of them rappelling down on silk threads, dropping all over your head and tangling their shroud lines around you. The normally pale-colored tree trunks were absolutely black - because they were coated with caterpillars. If you stood still, you could hear them munching, munching, while their droppings rained down, patter-patter-patter.

When the trees were stripped, they washed across the landscape in a seething wave, eating any vegetation they could find, digestible or not - grass, lilacs, rhubarb, pine needles, scraps of paper and dead leaves - until, twitching, millions of them finally died, with their vile, hairy, festering corpses spurned by even the birds.

The survivors built cocoons on any available surface, coating the siding of houses and outbuildings, filling the eaves, and lining crevices in tree bark, where hordes of earwigs abruptly appeared, ripping into the cocoons and devouring the contents. There were no survivors, and then the earwigs, too, died.

The carnage [1] finally ended around the middle of July. The surviving trees leafed back out, and all returned to normal. It has been over five years now, and I haven’t seen another forest tent caterpillar since then. All is at peace, until next time.

[1] Hey, what would be the abuse-to-plants equivalent to “carnage”? “Foliage”?