He looks as ugly as he sounds.

Blackish with brownish warts, his barbed brown hairs leave a painful rash when he comes into contact with the skin.

This is the brown-tailed moth caterpillar which attacked West Mersea in huge numbers last week, prompting Colchester's environmental health department to warn: "They are not something to be fiddled around with."

Pest control officers also report a high incidence of the moth caterpillars in the Tendring area.

They are not the only pests plaguing the region.

Two weeks ago, swarms of mysterious black flying insects descended on parts of Colchester.

They were later identified as St Mark's flies. In this case they posed no danger. It was just their time of the year.

There was no great threat either from the swarm of bees which invaded a garden in the Lexden area of Colchester last weekend.

An estimated 6,000 massed under an apple tree and had to be enticed into a box by a leading Essex beekeper using honeycomb as bait. He warned that bee swarms will be quite common this summer.

The same goes for the other creepy crawlies and pests which emerge as the temperatures rise.

Barry Chapman, the pest control technician for the Tendring district, is currently receiving up to 25 calls a day from residents faced with attacks on several fronts.

They come from places as far apart as Harwich and Clacton on the coast to Manningtree and Ardleigh and the Colchester borders.

He says: "I'm very busy. But it will get busier as it gets hotter. Then I could be getting more like 50 calls a day."

At the moment, the main enemy is rats, which can be a menace all year round.

He says: "Clacton and Manningtree are the worst spots. They are breeding on building sites and the like, and some of them are finding their way indoors."

Some people are reluctant to call him out until they are obliged to.

"They are embarrassed about reporting rat infestation. People feel it is their fault, that they are dirty or something. When I go to deal with the rats, I have to reassure them. There is no shame."

The same goes for another growing infestation. Fleas are booming on the coast and in Colchester.

"They are brought into the house by domestic pets," says Barry Chapman. "From there they get into the carpets or on to their owners and into their hair."

Again, the shame of carrying fleas in the hair makes many people shy about reporting the problem.

"Nobody likes the idea of fleas," says Barry Chapman.

"They think it sounds as though they don't wash their hair, but again I tell them not to worry. It's quite common in the summer and it's not them. It's their pets who are to blame."

His solution is to spray the premises and often the carpets with flea repellent. The owners are left to deal with their own hair.

Wasps also receive the spray treatment. They are among the most feared of the summer time bugs.

"I get more calls to clear out wasps nests than almost anything else at the height of summer. People are really scared of them," he revealed.

Wasps are also a major menace to the people of Colchester.

Colin Daines, the council's environmental control manager, describes them as one of the most complained-of pests, as well as one of the more difficult to trace.

Making their nests in the eaves and upper levels of houses they lead many pest control offiers a merry dance tracking them down.

Colin Daines is predicting a major invasion of wasps this summer.

"In a cold winter the frost will have got them, but this one was mild which means the queens probably survived. That always suggests we shall see an abundance of wasps in the summer."

One reason for the fearsome reputation of wasps is the allergy some people suffer. The allergy is extremely rare, but in the worst cases, the wasp sting can prove fatal.

The brown-tailed moth caterpillars currently chewing at Mersea's vegettion, represent one of the island's regular summer hazards.

Colin Daines says: "They can strip a bush so bare it looks as if its been hit by locusts."

He warns the caterpillars should be treated with caution.

"If anyone thinks they have an infestation they should not wade in bare-armed to deal with them."

The best way to combat them is a pyrethroid spray.

Mersea attracts other pests. The Mersea mosquito is an annual visitor. It comes from the marshes and is the one insect that escapes the pest control officers.

"Because the marshes are so widespread, it is impossible to identify their breeding grounds with any precision," says Colin Daines.

He adds: "The only way to deal with them would be to saturate the area with pesticide, but that could turn out to be disastrous for the wider environment."

So residents are advised to use their own insect repellant. The mosquito is one of the prices the islanders pay for living on Mersea. Bees, too, escape the punishment meted to most pests.

"We have very few calls about bees," says Colin Daines.

"When we do get a complain we have one or two beekeepers to call on for help."

Tendring's Barry Chapman also passes any complaints he gets about bees over to the experts.

They are different from other creatures in that they are protected. When forced to deal with a swarm, Barry Chapman's task is not to kill the bees but to disperse them and drive them away.

For this he uses a special repellent. Despite their reputations, the stinging caterpillars, the flies, the wasps, the bees and the bugs are the least of Barry Chapman's worries. To most householders they cause more inconvenience than pain.

Rats, though, are different. They represent, by far, the most numerous of all pests Barry is called on to combat. They cause the most damage and potentially pose the greatest danger.

"It's been a bad winter for rats and there are still a lot of them around," he says.

One reason is the amount of building work. Rats enjoy nothing better than to feed off a plank before sleeping it off in somebody's cellar.

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.