Spruce tree dying

[wde_1978]

Hello knowledgeable people

I am somewhat saddened due to my "in front of my house" decades old fir/evergreen tree being sick , and possibly dying.

Only 1.5 to 2 weeks ago it looked majestic as always , then it started turning brown from the top on down.
By now the top branches are almost "naked", the drying reached the lowest branches and the area directly underneath the tree is covered in a thick layer of dry brown needles.

This happened so fast that we (my family) are somewhat shocked!
That tree always seemed to like the spot it has been planted a few decades ago , it grew the strongest and tallest of all the fir/evergreen trees that we have all over our property.
It is at this point about 10 meters tall (estimated).

I don't think it dried out during this summer as we had a much drier summer two or three years ago at which all grass surfaces turned brown and didn't recover till the next spring/summer.
Could it be some illness or some sort of bug/insects infestation?
Is there any hope it will recover or should I put it out of its misery?

Here are some pictures, please beware they are 8 Megapixel shots and about 3 Megabyte in size each!
I opted not to resize them to show the current situation as best as possible.

I will make a second post with resized pictures for faster loading.

 

[wde_1978]

Resized pictures about 250 Kilobyte each , more suitable for a quick peak!

 

[Raintree]

Your tree is a spruce, the simplest explanation looking at your pics is a lightning strike. Would have happened in the spring, upper half & one side is toast. Take a rubber mallet & tap the dead side trunk & compare it to the live side. It may sound as if the bark is detached from the sap wood on the dead side.

 

[rudydose]

100% not lightning. Most likely spruce blight. If the top doesn't come back you'll have to replace the tree.

 

[wde_1978]

It is down!
We thought of leaving it to see whether it would recover, but the bark started chipping off on a large scale and we called it quits.
Once downed we discovered that the bark at the top of the tree was full of little holes, some bugs must have already moved in.

Last weekend a second, smaller and thinner, spruce tree bit the dirt too!
It dried out from the top down to the bottom just like the big one.

I now have a single spruce tree standing in front of my house, still green but odd looking.
The original tip died of years ago, thus two branches formed themselves into new tips.
This tree now has three tips, two live and one dead.

Thanks for Your replys guys!

 

[Raintree]

Please help us to understand what exactly is spruce blight. If it can drop over half of a mature Norway spruce's needles in a matter of weeks we would like more information.

 

[ATH]

I looked at some un-diagnosed rapid decline in spruce earlier this summer with 2 separate arborists in two different areas. The big ones were +/-14" dbh trees. "Too wet" was the suggestion from OSU Extension, but they never looked at it on site - wasn't a real wet area. Besides there were probably 30 trees in the windbreak and about 8-10 were dead or dying...randomly scattered, no pattern associated with water flow.

The other was a single tree.

There were beetle tracks under the bark, but they could just as likely be secondary. We scraped some bark off of a half dead tree and didn't find them, so I can't blame it on that.

There was some spruce spider mite damage and some spruce needle leaf miner...but neither of these will kill a tree - especially not in a matter of 2-3 months.

I guess my point is: I have no idea what rudydose means by "spruce blight"...but something took these out. Not saying this is the same thing...

 

[Raintree]

Did you test for Pine wood nematode they are known to hit spruce. Other than lightening it's the only other thing that I know of witch can shut down the vascular system quickly in a spruce.

 

[wde_1978]

R.I.P.