Bagworms?

I was out in our back yard a week ago and struck up a conversation with the guy next door.  He was out playing ball with his young son and I was on a mission to inform a particular spider that he would have to build his web somewhere other than our back porch.  We got to talking about work, the weather, church groups, and other sorts of neighborly subjects that are fairly commonplace for backyard discussions here in Oklahoma.  Soon he looked at our pine tree that is adjacent to the fence bordering our yards and made a simple observation.

"Looks like your tree's got bagworms," he spoke with all the confidence of a guy who's had his own yard for more than a little while.  Not even certain which tree he was talking about, I just sort of agreed more out of politeness than anything.  He pointed to the evergreen (you will notice, no doubt, that in referring to it by such a generic term that I obviously have no idea what particular type of evergreen it actually is) and, specifically, to the brown pinecone-like things that were hanging from the branches.

I had noticed these things before, but being the not-gardener that I am, figured it was just a bunch of pinecones.  I mean, they looked like pinecones, but the fact that our tree was also kind of dying never really made any connection to me between the two phenomenæ.

Not a pinecone. Who knew, eh?

Our neighbor said that they weren't so bad, really, and all we had to do was pick them off and throw them away.  Sounds simple enough, right?  Well, turns out it kind of was.  :)  This evening my wife and I were out in the yard for an hour or so with gloves on, picking the little buggers off our tree like it was the week after Christmas.  They were kind of gross and a tad squishy, and even though I didn't see any actual worms, I didn't exactly go looking for any either.  We're also supposed to spray the tree with some stuff called Sevin, which my dad used to spread around the yard when I was a kid to keep the bugs at bay.  That'll be tomorrow, though, and hopefully in the coming weeks and months our little tree fella will find new life once again.

Don't worry, little tree...soon you'll be good as new!  (hopefully)

I didn't do an official Bagworm count, but it was probably over 100.  Yech.