I know for you BC Boys on here these pics are nothing new to you, however I just found them still on my camera from my visit back to Williams Lake this past year to some of the old harvest blocks I looked after. The devastation is real, and will be felt by the forest industry for years to come. The biggest problem now that the beetle is in Alberta is the fact the Provincial Government here is making the mistakes that BC did in the early going. I have attended government meetings and expressed my opinion, however bureaucracy always wins over logic so my new saying that the beetle is like the titanic...we all know the ending before we watched it.
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/14756/PINEBEETLEBC1.JPG)
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/14756/Pinebeetle%20Williams%20lake%20landscape2.JPG)
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/14756/Pinebeetle%20Williams%20lake%20landscape.JPG)
Don't you just love the citizen committees that the government puts together to decide the fate of the resource then they get to make the final decision and say it was the citizens committee that made the decision. :-\
I never new citizen committee was involved!
Sadly, I can see the result now.
Sadly, I know pretty well what does “bureaucracy” mean.
Many years, many efforts are wiped out now. :-\
Samuel, thanks for showing me Alberta!
Pity – in bad shape!
Are they going to do anthing with the trees that are dead??
Thanks Alot Mr Mom
Quote from: tonich on February 04, 2007, 04:03:59 AM
I never new citizen committee was involved!
Sadly, I can see the result now.
Sadly, I know pretty well what does "bureaucracy" mean.
Many years, many efforts are wiped out now. :-\
Samuel, thanks for showing me Alberta!
Pity – in bad shape!
These pictures are actually in the BC interior west of Williams Lake. As far as salvaging the wood goes, there have been additional mills put up, and current ones expander to try and cut as much of this as they can. Doing this has flooded the lumber market and the prices are in the tank right now. Also the quality of the wood after it is red like this, is only good for 5-8 years tops, after that it is only good for pulp if you have a market for that. Also hauling these dead trees are expensive, as there is no weight on the trucks, so they bulk out with terrible pay loads.
And how about preventing healthy trees, next to dead ones from devastation?
As far as the beetles are in there, they’ll need to feed in sprig time.
What do the citizen committee say about the situation? ::) :D
Basically in areas that I have shown above, there are no healthy pine left. You do see a planted block there, however the diameter is such that the beetle over looks them.
The only way to stop this thing before it kills every pine tree in Canada, is to start harvesting the "at-risk" age class in Alberta in the next 3 years, or these pictures will be here in 5 years. The government is already forcing FMA holders to rethink the block sequencing to take care of some of this, but its not enough. We are a deciduous mill so our efforts will be small at best.
We need a long cold snap in the latter part of October to nail them before they go into the winter mode and that has not been happening. Otherwise, the only solution, as Samuel points out, is intense harvesting but that creates market issues.
I was reading about a big push on for wood pellet plants in BC. We have a lot of tax payer money going to big business to build pellet plants to process these trees, I guess the worst of it is, they need tax dollars to make it pay. A huge percentage of these wood products will be used overseas.
I don't see why the governments don't spend some money and build some power generating plants of some kind to utilize some of this wood. They may as well get as much used up as they can before it gets to rotten.
I was just thinking something....... Is there not a predator of the mountain pine beetle? You would think that there would be a natural one. If there is why wouldn't the government utilize something to this effect. And then there is the chemical side of things..... I personally don't agree with most of em but in such a case as this wouldn't it benefit to spray these areas with planes and choppers?
Quote from: Coon on February 04, 2007, 01:45:43 PM
I don't see why the governments don't spend some money and build some power generating plants of some kind to utilize some of this wood. They may as well get as much used up as they can before it gets to rotten.
I was just thinking something....... Is there not a predator of the mountain pine beetle? You would think that there would be a natural one. If there is why wouldn't the government utilize something to this effect. And then there is the chemical side of things..... I personally don't agree with most of em but in such a case as this wouldn't it benefit to spray these areas with planes and choppers?
The pine beetle problem is interesting to say the least. For those of you that don't know, its not the beetle that kills the tree, its the fungus that the beetle carries that actually kills the tree.
Mountain pine beetles mass attack and kill mature pine trees within a year. In mid-summer, the adults bore into suitable host trees and lay eggs in the bark. The larvae hatch and feed within the bark of the tree. Larvae develop into pupae, then to adult, and fly to the next host. The life cycle normally takes one year to complete. The following spring, the needles of the attacked tree fade to yellow and then to reddish-brown. For more details, click here.
The adult beetles introduce blue-stain fungi into the tree when they attack. These fungi, along with insect feeding, kill the tree by cutting off paths for nutrients and water. Each female lays 60-80 eggs, enabling populations to grow very quickly. There are often enough insects emerging from one tree to attack 15 additional trees.
For some more information, check out these sites:
Pine Beetle BC (http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfp/mountain_pine_beetle/facts.htm)
Pine Beetle Alberta (http://www.srd.gov.ab.ca/forests/health/mpb-commonquestions.html)
Even with that said there should still be a natural predator of the bettle. The governments and universities spend so much money developing chemicals for weeds and bugs. Why not the mountain pine beetle. They could aerial spray to some degree and atleast set them back. IF they sprayed say Chemical A to attack the fungi and Chemical B to kill the beetle and it killed say 10% would that not be a help????
This situation just puts me in total awe.......
As sawguy said , their natural population control is extreme cold weather at the right time. The only other natural predators are birds ie. woodpeckers and such.
These huge infestations are an indirect result of global warming :P
and no, it is not my fault :-X
Quote from: Kevin on February 03, 2007, 08:16:12 PM
Don't you just love the citizen committees that the government puts together to decide the fate of the resource then they get to make the final decision and say it was the citizens committee that made the decision. :-\
I know what that's about. We had a 'Select Committee on Wood Supply'. There were many non industry folks standing up and giving testimonials and opinion, I think close to 200. But what gets me there were areas of the province that if the meeting were held, there would be many more people there. They don't seem to go too far from the legislature for their meetings. In the end it was a closed door decision made with industry execs and government bureaucrats. For some reason the further away you are from the University and centre of Government the less significant and intelligent you appear to be to the policy makers.
I have been doing some reading and there is not a chemical spray that has been developed to deal with this detestation. What we need is -40 degree temperatures in October or in April to knock them out, otherwise cold in the remainder of the time during winter has little affect since they are so dormant.
OK! So this is the evil beast!
(https://forestryforum.com/board/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2Fe%2Fe3%2FDendroctonus_ponderosae.jpg%2F250px-Dendroctonus_ponderosae.jpg&hash=4007dee59d0a52916448ca2278acd7bc09435adb)
From my point of view, prior harvesting you should consider decreasing beetle population to reasonable scale. I believe pheromones attractants (http://esa.confex.com/esa/2004/techprogram/paper_16706.htm) can be of good service. This is a biological (not chemical) approach and you don’t have to spray around anything that some creatures may not like at all. And you don’t have to wait any citizen committee to approve this practice.
Hello tonich:
That looks like the guy. And he's got trillions of his buddies with him. I was in the beetle program from the early nineties for about ten years - snip and skid -(handfalling and skidding small patches) - then got into milling/lumber finishing as the body wore out. The scale of this infestation boggles the mind. Red - as far as the eye can see. And then the next valley and the next - red. I talked to a person in the know last month and he said in our forest district, Nadina, there are 60 million cubic metres of lodgepole pine not spoken for by any processors. Figure around 300 board feet to a cubic metre of wood. Next year it will probably be double that. And then there won't be any pine. Get a map of BC out and this infest goes from Coquihalla area West of Kelowna all the way up to Babine Lake north of me. And growing. And it's now in Alberta on a huge front - and Coon, rumour is it will like your jackpine, and be chewing in your back yard soon. It is unbelievable.
How many years til it reaches the east coast? :( :(
Similar beasts to your SE Corley. They've devastated a few southern pine plantations from Va southward. My 'guess' is they are more vulnerable to cold. They have been working on them at V-Tech.
It's not the tropical ones I'm concerned with. It's those moving east across Canada. Looks very bad :(