I Think That I Will Never See

…an insect less welcome that EAB.

Emerald Ash Borer, an invasive from Asia. No natural predators. No stopping it

Emerald Ash Borer: A jewel-like beetle that would make a lovely broach, but in its millions, makes for a miserable and devastating invasive hoard. And since they are here and I’m just now knowing it, I guess I’ve had my head in a cloud, spending a lot of time lately looking up and less looking out. Up is where the light is.

Yes the scales fell from my eyes, sadly, a month or two ago while we were walking on a local trail (which we do a lot more of in the days of Covid-Cancelled Conviviality and in the absence of eclectic and widely-omnivorous pot-lucks in our little part of the world.)

The first signs of damage caused slowly by EAB infestation is a symptom that could easily go unnoticed in the summer. I confess I’d not paid it any mind, if the condition even existed in this part of Southwest Virginia (Floyd County south of Roanoke) before this recent growing season. Now, the tree pox is too conspicuous and widespread to ignore. Yesterday, on the Smartview trail (Blue Ridge Parkway MP 154) we saw again the odd patchy bicolored tree trunks we’d noted first on parkway trails along the crest further west.

The base of infested trees is littered with outer bark shreds, abetted by the action of woodpeckers. In some places, vertical lines of fresh pecking were evident.

I should have suspected that a sudden new and prominently visible aspect to common forest trees was NOT going to turn out to be a good thing. And so I brought home some photo-evidence to confirm my suspicions. At first, I hoped the holes in these tree trunks were caused by another less fatal pest that EAB. Seemed to me the holes were much smaller here than the ones I’d seen in the Extension Service Wanted Posters.

But no, this is exactly what a forest looks like when an entire species experiences its own pandemic—like American Chestnut and Elm devastated by exotic fungal diseases, and more recently, Eastern Hemlock that succumbed to a tiny bit of fluff called the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid. Forests have suffered grave losses before in the lives of living generations.

And I wish I did not know. But now I can’t look away, can not pretend this loss is happening other places but not here; is underway now and not in some distant age after humanity has recovered from its own pestilence. I wish I didn’t care.

The stripped outer bark lies in tattered piles around the base of infested trees, worked heavily by woodpeckers nourished by the windfall protein of burrowing larvae in the cambium, just under the bark. At least in this unspeakable loss, there are some gains for a few other creatures just making a living no less than this shimmering and innocent but terribly inconvenient beetle. Firewood burners, too, reap the harvest, but:

CAUTION: Watch Your Ash. Tops can die first, leaving widowmakers for dead-tree firewood harvesters. You were warned before warmed.

First noted in the US only in 2002, probably in wooden pallets from China. I remember reading with dread about EAB (and seeing the purple traps Tech entomology students placed along Goose Creek) when first blogging via Fragments from Floyd in 2002. It was found in Virginia the next year, but “eradicated” quickly from the Commonwealth, only to reappear in 2016, and now is found in at least 25 Virginia counties. There was a national plan in place to slow the spread of this forest pest, but no more:

“On December 18th, 2020 the USDA declared it was abandoning its Ash quarantine rules for lumber and firewood, stating that the quarantine failed to prevent the Emerald Ash Borer’s spread from the thirteen Michigan counties where it was first identified in 2002. Now the insect is known to be ravaging Ash trees in thirty-five states and the District of Columbia.

“We no longer consider regulatory and enforcement activities to be an effective use of program funds,” the agency said in its ruling announcement. “Domestic quarantine regulations have been on the whole, unable to prevent the spread of EAB (Emerald Ash Borer).”

We give up. We’ve lost. No masks. No hand washing. No social distancing. We’ll just hope for other species to fill in the gaps. Chimps and dolphins, oaks and hickories, are you listening?

Quotes above from “An Elegy for Ash Trees” which you should read if it will do you good to celebrate the place these trees have held in American history and society, and to mourn their passage in a time of global distress among plants and people alike.

The pity: at a time when we are finally understanding the importance of stopping deforestation and undertaking re-forestation, we are losing hundreds of millions of standing, living, carbon-storing helpers in this fight. Just replacing those lost trees is an impossible task. Anything that diminishes forest health decreases our chances of controlling atmospheric CO2 and greenhouse warming.

And if you want a deeper read yet, visit NYT for Teaching My Child to Love a Dying World, where the subtitle says “My toddler son and I spoke about the trees as people — and indeed, for the first month of quarantine, they were the only people besides us he got to see up close.”

From American Forests: Will We Kiss Our Ash Goodbye?

And…The poop sheet on EAB from Virginia Tech if you need more objective hard-factual information.