Beetle devastation

[beastmaster]

I just started a new job up near Yosemite, were contracting for PG&E removing dead and hazardous trees. Nothing prepared me for the existent of the damage being done. Some areas every pine is dieing or dead. You see big areas on the mountain side of brown areas that are dead trees. Every once in the while you see one green tree amist the dead ones. I hope someone is collecting seed or clone from those serviving trees.They must have some kind of resistance to the beetle wouldn't you think? Because at this rate pine trees will be exstinct soon. On the plus side its a gold mine for some.

 

[JRoland]

A little north of you, but same thing here. A buddy is the CalTrans tree crew foreman they are working in Mariposa and he told me last weekend when I saw him that it's pretty bad over there. Just finished a yard where there were 29 pine trees and had to remove all of them. Guy has 6 small cedar trees in his front yard left.

 

[beastmaster]

We're doing a yard tomorrow removing 30 trees. Down south in some areas there is nothing left but cedar trees. Their like weeds

 

[Zale]

Nature, it's a *****.

 

[Zale]

PC software, can't even say the word *****.

 

[BC WetCoast]

We are getting over a Mountain Pine beetle epidemic that started in Tweedsmuir Park (Coast mountain Range about 50 km from the coast) and went north east across the province into Alberta, about a distance of 1000 km. Flying across it during it's peak and you would see oceans of red killed trees. The local sawmills ramped up their cut to take advantage before the wood degraded below lumber grade. We're talking thousands of acres.

The stands are starting to come back. The beetle only took out the mature and older immature timber. Seedlings and understory survived.

It's nature's renewal. For a lot of these ecosystems, fire is the primary stand renewal mechanism. Man has done a good job of suppressing fire and taken timber stands into age classes they normally aren't found.

For our stands, the pine is most susceptible when the timber is 100-140 years old. Somehow we ended up with thousands of acres of pine stands in these age ranges. Obviously, this has occurred in the past, except that after the beetle epidemic 100+ years ago, there were fires to clean up the stands and initiate the new stands. (Many pines require fire to open old cones and release the seed.)

 

[JRoland]

Here the local sawmill did not ramp up their cut, they are still flooded with logs from a 200+ thousand acre fire in 2013.
The last job I did I gave all the logs I could to the local recycling yard, they are allowed to bring 1 logging truck load or 1 end dump load of 8' and 16' logs per week to the cogeneration plant. However, cut less than 8' you have to pay to dispose of it. PG&E crews took down 8 trees in the front yard of the same house, they cut it at random length anywhere from 4' to 10'

 

[Groundman One]

I just started a new job up near Yosemite, were contracting for PG&E removing dead and hazardous trees. Nothing prepared me for the existent of the damage being done. Some areas every pine is dieing or dead. You see big areas on the mountain side of brown areas that are dead trees. Every once in the while you see one green tree amist the dead ones. I hope someone is collecting seed or clone from those serviving trees.They must have some kind of resistance to the beetle wouldn't you think? Because at this rate pine trees will be exstinct soon. On the plus side its a gold mine for some.

Do yours look like this?

This is what we have here.

 

[beastmaster]

We have the little red ones and big black ones. We have those to if they're incandescent blue.

 

[JRoland]

We have mountain pine beetles and western pine beetles. They are smaller than the beetle pictured above. They are half an inch long at most. Picture above looks different than these.

 

[windthrown]

Yep. The beetles are killing my pines off here in the Northern Oregon Cascades. Lodgepole pines, not too old (maybe 40 years). They are bleeding sap and this summer the heat and drought killed a few of them. I am dropping the dead ones now and processing them into firewood. I expect to lose most of them. Some are beetle resistant it seems. One also has canker. We shall see longer term though.

 

[JRoland]

Started another job today where every tree in the yard is dead. Gotta make sense of this pile first....

 

[JRoland]

Only three trees left to take down, then a whole bunch more cleanup. Two estimates/ proposals going out to the neighbors, maybe it won't snow for a bit and we will just stay in the neighborhood...