We can’t have nothing nice. Saw this disturbing headline this morning and will be on the lookout. Forget the lantern fly. A mysterious new pest has scientists sounding the alarm.
Haven't seen that here, and hope not to. I feel like it's rare to see a Beech that's free of BBD, so now if those worms spread.....
Yep. Every Beech tree in my area has it. They’ll be all dead by next year. Not many on my property and mostly smaller ones but they’ve all got it. Took an atv ride last week around the forest. Even miles away on the other side of the forest they’ve all got it. Didn’t see one without.
Sad, especially after seeing so many beech die over the past years here in MI. I only have a very few young beech here.
So this is different from the blight or whatever it is? I think I have seen small pockets of blight, but not seen any trees browning out. I have mixed feelings about Beech. It's nice for wildlife and makes good firewood if you can get it to split. Other hand it shades out the forest floor and out competes Oak. If you occassionally sell trees, oak & hickory are far superior. Anyone else ever see the little white bugs on them? They'll just cover like one branch. Have seen them since way back, certain summers.
Funny you posted this. I was pulling splits from my woods yesterday (I CSS wood there until needed) and noticed most of the beech were affected. One grove it was rather noticeable as the sun was reaching the forest floor. Quite a bit of them in my woods assorted sizes. One good sized tree too made me sad to see a majestic tree dying. Well if they die off i may get a quad or tractor to harvest what i can. Not really the way id like to get firewood but why let it go to waste.
“No funding…” Can’t talk about that Can’t talk about the half dozen reasons why our North American ecosystems are under threat of extinction in the first place either So what can we say? Seems like for every native species we have here, there’s a pest/pathogen “over there” that inevitably ends up on a shipping container and starts wiping out what we have here. So clearly the solution is to replace every single one of our native species with species from “over there” We did this to ourselves, and obviously have learned nothing in the many, many decades of decline.
It reminded me that it’s all about what’s important to the forestry industry. Beech is a pest that inhibits the spread and growth of fast growing $ trees.
Do you think if it were Douglas Firs or oaks they’d find a way to make it priority? I look at the ash story and the anemic response to that disaster. Ash is/was a fairly lucrative swath of the forestry industry for baseball bats and tool handles. Yet that’s been allowed to fall by the wayside with very little resistance.
If it was wiping out pine and poplar I bet there would be a state of emergency. I’m not that familiar with western timber species. I have not seen an extension service alert on this nematode. If it’s in Virginia, I know it’s already in our northern counties. I heard about eab years before they showed up. It was like alright already we got it.
I only mention Doug fir because that's THE standard dimensional lumber species for buildings and homes across America. It's a humongous cash crop/renewable resource that a lot of short and long-term management goes into for sustainability. I read that years ago our white pines were under threat from white pine blister rust. A host plant for the rust was a few native species of currants, so all over states outlawed the plants, and a huge effort was put forth to eradicate the currants in order to spare the pines. There are still currants today, in small pockets though and the pines are still around obviously. I shouldn't be so quick to judge the response to EAB as anemic. There have been breeding programs through universities, research into biocontrol via Asian wasps that target the beetles, etc. As for the beech leaf disease though, I first noticed it in CT last year, but it's evidently been here a few years. It seems to spread very fast as last year some neighboring stands were unaffected, but this year they're all hit hard. Beech are prolific in sending up suckers like aspen does, so we'll have to wait and see how the trees respond long-term. Maybe the guys further west who've been dealing with the problem longer can chime in on the resilience (or lack of) within their beech stands.
With the movement of man and ships from various Countries, this has been going on for (Hundreds) of years. Nothing really new, just like disease in people. There is always blame to go around but it's no different than the simple Sparrow. NOT native to the United States! Came here with sailing ships from the UK.
That's exactly what the beech tree leaves look like here. I first noticed it right after the May freeze when I went for a walk looking for more damage after noticing how bad my tiny orchard was affected. I was hoping it was the freeze as many/most trees recover from that.
