by Dr. Roger Roots, Lysander Spooner University
A decade ago, folks in northern states such as Minnesota, South and North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho were watching large swaths of their pine forests die off due to invasive pine beetles. The pine beetles bored beneath the bark of pine trees and introduced a fungus and larvae which weakened and then killed the trees.
Millions of pine trees were killed, prompting environmentalists and state and federal government agencies to link the invasive beetles to catastrophic-manmade-global-warming-by-carbon dioxide. Science Magazine warned that “Climate Change Sends Beetles Into Overdrive” (Mar. 16, 2012). The U.S. Forest Service launched numerous web pages under a “Bark Beetles and Climate Change in the United States” designation.
State and federal agencies collected and spent millions of dollars to mitigate the effects of the beetles. Several states amassed funds in designated ‘beetle epidemic’ accounts.
But colder weather accomplished what the agencies could not. Five years of harsh winters have mostly killed off the beetles in the north woods. Most foresters declared the end of the beetle epidemic around 2017. Almost no one seemed to link the END of the epidemic to earlier claims regarding a link to the CO2 apocalypse.
Now the State of South Dakota has $700,000 remaining in a ‘pine beetle fund’ which was never used. Last week the South Dakota legislature debated about what to do with the excess money. The debate was the topic of Tuesday’s top front page in the Rapid City Journal.
Please define PINE. There are a variety of conifers such as Spruce, Fir, Tamarac, Cedar, Hemlock, and others including sub species thereof.
Yes, there are several species of Pine including Yellow Pine, White Pine, Red Pine and others. BUT…
Every damn idiot city slicker and environmentalists call them all PINE. They aren’t all pine and even bugs like the Spruce Budworm only affect… spruce.
Next time I hear someone call a spruce, fir or cedar a PINE, I’m gonna start my really big chainsaw and give them an unforgettable education.
Maybe it’s true that bark beetles fly or are blown great distances, but I think that’s the exception to the rule. In the 60s I was told by a forester that bark beetles travel from tree that touches tree that touches tree, and that was visually obvious. But after clearcutting the forests were being replanted doug fir, doug fir, doug fir, as far as the eye could see. No meadows, no deciduous, no diversity, nothing to provide a natural barrier to the advancement of the bark beetles. No surprise here.
The forester told you wrong.
This is nothing new. When I was in 9th grade (1960), I read a book on ecology for young people. The first chapter described “the death of a forest.” It was due to a big blow down. The bark beetles could live on the underside of the tree against the ground, safe from bird predators. The young beetles than spread like wildfire, killing off the rest of the forest.
As a youth, of course “the death of a forest” sounded like the end of the world. Those trees must be 100 (!!!!) years old.
Now, of course, I understand that forests come and go. One hundred years is of little note. Nothing is permanent, except, of course, human credulity.
Beetles live inside the bark so they’re safe from predators other than woodpeckers, and the beetles are throughout the whole tree. A blown down tree still has roots in the ground, still is just barely alive, but doesn’t have enough sap flow to push invading beetles out, so the bugs all survive and thrive, then attack and overwhelm the defenses of the surrounding standing trees.
That is exactly what happened in 1974 when a storm blew down a stand of spruce at the headwaters area of the Bowron River in central British Columbia. The resulting infestation of spruce bark beetles killed thousands of acres and was only stopped by a severe early cold snap in October of 1985. It took 30 years but the spruce beetles are again on the march in that region, because the trees are old and vulnerable.
The Lodge Pole pine beetle problem is essentially an issue of an available food supply. This is usually created by huge swaths of old, even aged monoculture pine forests that have become weakened and susceptible to an infestation. Sometimes it is fast tracked by large area’s of these same monoculture old weakened forests to have large numbers of blow down due to wind where the beetle’s can get a healthy start on the underside of the tree close to ground from which their populations explode and just by sheer numbers, billions of beetles are soon munching their way through healthy younger pine trees that normally would survive but due to overwhelming numbers, get infected and die and the whole pine forest is killed. These overpopulations can then even get into old Ponderosa Pine as well as Jackpine.
When it is a very large outbreak over large area’s and large distances due to wind borne beetle flights, then even juvenile pine and mixed forest pine is highly susceptible since they are the last things to be a food source. Either running out of food or having extended cold snaps are the only thing to slow this down. Or fire, which is how all this co-evolved over millions of years. Controlling fire the last 75 years really changed a lot of how all this unfolds, and just exacerbated the pine beetle/forest problem including some of the huge forest fires we now have. Unfortunately, the CAGW movement seized on this as a poster boy of climate change and spun it for misinformation against CO2 emissions. But the pine beetle issue is completely normal and is just a matter of time when these even aged forests get old, and they actually create the pine beetle infestation with their vast food source they supply for the beetle.
Perhaps a good way for the average lay person to think about this, is planting your entire garden to cabbage, and then wondering why in mid summer when all the cabbage are maturing, you get cabbage worms and all your cabbage gets wiped out. It really is as simple as this.
No, it’s even simpler than that. It has nothing to do with monocultures, especially planted monocultures. Most outbreaks in the lodgepole pine up here have been in mixed stands, and NONE occurred in planted stands. It’s always the old, overmature, natural, unlogged pine that is vulnerable to beetles. None of the planted pines are old enough to be vulnerable to outbreaks, although they do succumb to overwhelming attacks from beetles that incubated in old growth forests. In fact, monoculture plantings would lessen, almost completely, the chance of infestation, because the plantations are spread out over many years, and planted blocks are all differing ages, slated to be logged again when they reach maturity, never to reach old age. The beetles will always be with us, but the more we log the forests, the less chance there is of ever having another mass infestation like the current one.
“It has nothing to do with monocultures”
Wow, you have obviously never been to British Columbia where the massive outbreak of the Lodge Pole Pine beetle started in the West Chilcotin near Tweedsmuir Park. Most of the entire Chilcotin is a monoculture pine and thousands and thousands of square miles were completely wiped out first in the 1980’s through early 2000’s before gaining such huge numbers of beetles so as to wipe out the healthier mixed stands of pine in those mixed forests. Which were more on the east side of the Fraser River. It sounded from your earlier comments you actually knew something about this, but obviously your statement that the even age old growth monoculture pine had nothing to do with it is absurd. It has everything to do with it, and is why there are such vast area’s of monoculture pine that co-evolved with the pine beetle and fire over millions of years.
I spent nearly 50 years working in the forests of the BC interior, from the southern border to the North Peace, and yes that includes the Chilcotin. I’m familiar with the pine stands, and also the dryland douglas fir stands of the area.
That outbreak started IN Tweedsmuir, not near it. That’s why nothing was done, the “environmentally conscious” government of the day wouldn’t allow logging or other types of mitigation within the park. Nature must be allowed to takes its course in parks, they said. It’s only because nothing was done that it grew so large that by the time it reached the park boundaries, there was nothing that could be done to stop it. The earlier outbreak in Manning park was also in a monoculture pine stand but action was taken when it was only 350 acres, so it was stopped. The Kettle river outbreak was a mixed stand that extended thousands of acres before it was eventually stopped. The Williston lake outbreak was a mixed stand and couldn’t be stopped, despite all logging in the area being diverted to the infestation, covering many thousands of acres. All outbreaks spread just as fast as the Tweedsmuir outbreak, mixed or monoculture, it makes no difference. A pine beetle has no problem flying past a couple spruce to get to the next pine.
In the scheme of things Art, there is nothing much that can be done when these over mature decadent pine forests get that old. (over 100 years) Park or no park. They are literally ‘food’ and home for these beetles as their populations naturally explode. This is all a completely natural cycle of the forest. I feel a little stupid now 35-40 years later having gone out on these trap tree fall and burn exercises. In the end it didn’t matter a wit, since pretty much every tree got caught up in the eventual tsunami of pine beetles that were coming. The maturity of the forest, and its health (and weather) are what cause the beetle infestation. We had some warm winters in the early 1980’s that allowed this infestation to gestate. After the cold winters of the 1960’s-1970’s when the natural cycle of the beetle was curtailed with cold winters.
It is now starting to happen all over the older Douglas Fir forests, especially the pure stands of near 100% Fir, and am watching them now selectively log these with helicopters around the Williams Lake area. It will slow it down, but in the end they will succumb too, as will my mixed Woodlot stand of Fir, Spruce, Cedar and Deciduous. It is what happens to these old growth forests if cold winters don’t continue, fire doesn’t intervene, or we don’t log it. Blaming it on any climate change is just an excuse since it will inevitably be warm enough a few winters to get the beetles going sooner or later as the forest gets older and weaker.
Perhaps the Gov’t policy of the day should have been an acceleration of the logging of the better stands of these pine forests, and it could have been slowed a bit, enough to maybe allow us to keep on top of harvesting it while it was still red and dead, but not checked and near falling over. Instead we gorged on the rich Spruce valley bottoms and the much more valuable Douglas Fir, which are much easier and more profitable to mill. I also spent 40 years in the interior logging and managing these forests and my small company has cut and harvested millions of these dead pine trees. Believe it or not, some of the dead Pine wood from the Chilcotin that have been dead 20-25 years is still being harvested today as it is still dry enough in some locations to not have detoriated the wood. The mills don’t really like it although their mill is geared up for that profile of wood, but then this is what what is left after exhausting half the available AAC in this region. It’s last use will be for biomass electricity generation, although it isn’t really worth the cost of harvesting and hauling past a certain mileage, especially now that BC isn’t buying much new IPP energy and will have a larger surplus from Site C in 2024.
Sounds to me like a massive program of timbering and replanting would take care of this “problem”. Out with the old and in with the new. That is pretty much what nature does, so why waste all that timber by letting it die, burn/rot, followed by the painfully slow regrowth by natural means. Take what nature does and improve upon it!
I think it was back around the ’70s when Colorado had a bad infestation of the Pine Bark Beetle that killed off most of the Ponderosa Pines in many ar4as of the state, including Boulder County. It wasn’t the beetles themselves that caused the problem in was a blue mold fungus that many of the beetles carried with them from tree to tree. Pine paneling with streaked with blue from the fungus became readily available and inexpensive. The local cure/protection at the time was to spray the trees with Pine Tree and Ornamental Spray from the ground up to as high as the sprayer could reach. I saved all of the Ponderosas on the top of my little ridgelet with that procedure while the surrounding mountains were covered with dead pines. The infestation was finally stopped by Mother Nature when the temperature one night dropped to -35 deg. F for about 3 or 4 hours, which resulted in around a 99% kill of the pine beetle. The temperature had to drop that low to overcome the propylene glycol the beetles manufactured to protect themselves from the winter cold.
Another effect of Global Warming…
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/metro-vancouver-hummingbirds-hungry-1.5036653
Hummingbirds struggling as feeders freeze up…
The ice cover on the Great Lakes has exceeded 71% and is growing. Lake Superior can freeze completely.
Great Lakes can freeze up to 90 percent.
