Saws needed to make forest resilient

GUNNISON – With not much left to feed on, the mountain bark beetles of northern Colorado have been faltering the last few years. But spruce trees in southwestern Colorado have been getting hit hard.

Foresters estimate 30 percent mortality of spruce trees on the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests.

“What we’re really facing is a natural process exacerbated by all the droughts we’ve had,” said Scott Armentrout, the forest supervisor.

In one area of the San Juans, near Lake City, all spruce trees larger than 3 inches in diameter have been attacked.

In response, the Forest Service plans to “treat” up to 120,000 acres over the next decade. In most cases, the agency “treats” forests by cutting trees, sometimes in clear cuts but also in techniques such as shelter cuts. But agency spokeswoman Lee Ann Loupe points out that at high-use locations, such as campgrounds and ski areas, the agency has used pheromones, or sexual attractants, to draw bark beetles and then applied pesticides to kill them.

Beetle epidemics are nothing new. Scientists don’t have the techniques to document beetle infestations before American settlement of the West. That leaves just a brief recorded history. Even so, there have been scourges before.

In the late 1930s, for example, a wind storm blew spruce trees down in the Flat Tops between Glenwood and Steamboat Springs. Bark beetles took their time but by the late 1940s were proliferating. Adopting militaristic jargon, the Forest Service declared war. Newspapers, too, urged eradication of the enemy.

The agency recruited workers to dump pesticides on trees. As more pitched battles were being laid in 1951, reports began trickling in: The beetles had disappeared. In February the previous winter, it had gotten cold – real cold: 56 degrees below zero in Eagle, located west of what is now Vail.

Those spruce trees preserved well, even when dead, and the snags were harvested off the Flat Tops well into the 1990s for use as logs in houses.

In the case of spruce in southern Colorado, the spread began from the Weminuche Wilderness in the early 2000s, says Bob Cain, regional entomologist for the U.S. Forest Service in Colorado. He attributes the cause to a combination of drought and blown-down trees.

The epidemic is much in evidence on Wolf Creek Pass, where most trees have died. The beetles have been migrating north and east, but not so much west to places like Durango and Telluride, says Cain.

Can the spruce beetle be stamped out? Well, yes – and no. Cain and other foresters point out that areas that have been cut in the past now look green, as the younger trees are better able to withstand the beetles.

But what the Forest Service understands now, which it didn’t 65 years ago, is that beetle infestations are just too broad and natural to try to suppress them.

George Sibley, an author and resident of the Crested Butte-Gunnison area since 1967, sees several upsides to the spruce epidemic, including reduced water needs.

“A lot of the beetle-kill places are projected to come back as aspen stands, and I consider that a plus. According to my Forest Service friends, aspens use less water over the course of a year … And – possibly a big bonus – they are not catching snow on leafy branches like the spruce and fir do, most of which sublimates directly to vapor during the cold season,” he says. “Just because they’ve been here for a hundred-plus years doesn’t mean the spruce are the best thing that could be inhabiting the land. My Eden complex has gradually disappeared as I’ve learned more about the natural history of stuff in the West. This place has never been very well organized.”

Feeding bears and staring down a lion

JASPER, Alberta – A visitor to Jasper National Park pleaded ignorance when he was fined $2,500 for feeding bears.

The Jasper Fitzhugh reports that the visitor was seen going within 12 feet of a black bears sow and her cubs, despite warnings from others to keep his distance. He was then witnessed feeding a bear cub sunflower seeds.

Meanwhile, a pair of bicyclists had paused to walk along a river near the park’s eastern gate. They joked about needing a big stick. But when one of them tossed a rock into a bush after hearing a rustling, a mountain lion jumped out.

“It stopped maybe a meter and a half or two from Sam,” said Donald Lauder, a visitor from Australia, referring to his companion, Samantha Leer. “It was just staring at us and hissing.”

The Australians hit the cat with the stick and pelted it with rocks. The cat seemed unfazed. This went on for some time. Finally, Lauder threw a rock that grazed the cougar’s head, and it vanished into the bush.

“Cougars tend to only vocalize when in a defense situation, protecting kill sites or possibly young,” a wildlife specialist with Parks Canada told the Fitzhugh. He visited the site and found no carcass that the lion was trying to protect, suggesting the cat was in a huff about its kittens.

Long, hot summers equal bark beetles

WINTER PARK – Rising temperatures have caused the mountain bark beetles that have plagued forests from British Columbia to New Mexico, right?

Well, not exactly, Jeffry Mitton, who has been studying beetles since 1976, was in Winter Park recently, near the epicenter of the epidemic that in places has killed 80 to 90 percent of lodgepole pine trees.

Mitton said it’s not that the winters haven’t been cold enough to pare beetle populations. Instead, he said that spring has arrived six to eight weeks early. As a result, the beetles produce two generations each summer.

“Two generations instead of one means that there’s an exponential increase in the number of beetles in the forest,” Mitton said, according to an account in the Sky-Hi News.

Mitton observed that in the last 25 years, mountain bark beetles have climbed 2,000 feet above their previous range in Colorado and have traveled 400 miles farther north in Canada.

Epidemics in lodgepole forest typically occur on average every 60 years, he said, but not with precise regularity. He said it’s unclear how the warming climate could affect the cycles of bark beetle epidemics in the future.

But according to the Sky-Hi News, Mitton was not appalled by the forests’ decimation. Aspen can replace lodgepole stands killed by beetles.

“Yes, it’s awful that the trees died,” he said. “But hey, that’s not so bad.”

Forest thinning not great fire answer JACKSON, Wyo. – With wildfires smoking up the skies, residents of Jackson Hole turned out to hear ecologist and author George Wuerthner talk about programs intended to reduce fuels on public lands.

The topic is pertinent, reports the Jackson Hole News&Guide, because the Forest Service proposes to thin 1,757 acres of the local national forest and conduct managed burns on another 12,524 acres.

But Wuerthner cautioned foresters against promising too much.

“Don’t give a false impression that you’re going to have the ability to stop a severe fire,” he said. “When (a severe fire) happens, no matter what you’ve done, it’s going to go out the window.”

“What you have to emphasize, he said, reducing the flammability of and aorund homes, he said. He further said that the data he has examined suggest that prescribed burning works better than thinning to forestall future fires.

Homes built after 2010 within Teton County’s wildland-urban interface are required to abide by FireWise building prescriptions, but buildings predating the regulation are exempted.

– Allen Best

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