On a Tuesday evening in late October, the Carvel Building at the University of Delaware's Carvel Research & Education Center in Georgetown will dim the lights for a film about creatures most people step over without a second glance. The center is hosting a free screening of The Extraordinary Caterpillar, a 60-minute documentary, on October 20, 2026, beginning at 6:30 p.m.
The film is not a typical nature documentary about charismatic megafauna. It is about the small things that hold the food web together, and it makes its case with numbers that tend to surprise people. According to the film's producers, a single chickadee nest needs somewhere between 6,000 and 9,000 caterpillars to feed the young during just their first two weeks of life. Grizzly bears, too, depend on caterpillars to put on weight before winter. Remove the caterpillars, and the effects ripple upward through birds, bats, spiders, lizards and the rest of the chain.
The documentary was produced by Merit Motion Pictures, the Winnipeg-based company led by Merit Jensen Carr, who serves as executive producer. It was written and directed by Jeff McKay, whose earlier work includes Call of the Forest: The Forgotten Wisdom of Trees; McKay produced the caterpillar film alongside Carr and Joanne Jackson. It premiered as a TVO Original in Canada on September 11, 2025, and has since been picked up for community screenings, including an Earth Day 2026 showing at the Nugget Theaters in Hanover, New Hampshire, that drew a capacity crowd.
What makes the film visually distinctive is the macro videography of Sam Jaffe, a naturalist who founded The Caterpillar Lab, a New Hampshire-based organization devoted to caterpillar outreach. Jaffe's high-resolution close-ups reveal caterpillars as master shape-shifters: some mimic bird droppings, some resemble tiny dragons, others disguise themselves as leaves or twigs. Shot in 4K, the film introduces viewers to species that most people have never seen, let alone photographed.
The human cast is a who's-who of the native-plant movement. Doug Tallamy, the University of Delaware entomologist and author whose books helped launch a national conversation about native plants and insects, appears in the film as co-founder of the Homegrown National Park movement, which is also the U.S. organizer of the film's impact campaign. Entomologist David Wagner, who is at work on a book on the caterpillars of western North America, also features, as does Antonia Guidotti of the Royal Ontario Museum. In Toronto, young participants in the environmental charity EcoSpark walk through an urban woodlot learning to look closer, and gardeners in the city's Annex neighborhood show how small yard-level changes add up.
The film's urgency comes from a stark statistic: global insect populations have fallen by roughly 45 percent since 1970, and North America has lost about three billion birds in the same span. A leading culprit, the filmmakers argue, is the replacement of native plants with lawns and non-native ornamentals that cannot support local food webs. The documentary's second half turns practical, showing families how removing invasive plants and planting native species can turn a yard into habitat.
That message lands with particular resonance at the Carvel Center, which serves as the southern agricultural experiment station for the University of Delaware College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Today the campus encompasses the 347-acre Thurman Adams Jr. Agriculture Research Farm, the Warrington Irrigation Research Farm in Harbeson, a poultry diagnostics lab, and Sussex County Cooperative Extension programs including 4-H. A film about the ecological value of native plants fits comfortably into a place whose stated mission is teaching, research and extension outreach.
The event is designed for families, and the running time — one hour — is short enough for younger children. The center is at 16483 County Seat Highway in Georgetown. For anyone who has ever wondered what is really happening in the weeds at the edge of the lawn, it is an hour well spent.