Spruce Budworm News

An old threat to the north country is coming back and its really not getting much PR in the mainstream press. I was in high school during the peak of the last epidemic and remember the reports from folks in the woods and the money being spent dousing the woods with pesticides. The state of Maine has already rejected spraying this time so the epidemic is going to be even worse than previously. I expect we will be seeing in spreading down to Northern NH in a couple of years.

http://maineforest.org/issues-infor...ded-trapping-shows-budworm-increased-in-2014/

Not just a New England issue, moved to Gen'l Backcountry. Thanks for posting.

Spruce and firs are generally even aged stands and are managed that way. When the budworm moves in full bore there will be close to 100% mortality in the stands and very quickly there will be 100s if not thousands of acres of dead dry trees waiting for either a natural or man caused ignition source. This will jump from stand to stand. During the prior epidemic, the paper industry was still booming in the region so the landowners did landscape level salvage cuts. Eventually new growth moves in and the cycle starts again. It is a very similar to what is happening out west and in western Canada with the pine bark beetles. The New England climate is far wetter so wildfire is less of an issue but still I expect there will be more of them.

The budworm is a natural pest that has been here since the glaciers retreated, there are long term records of these epidemics. Some argue that forestry practices make it worse but others argue that there just wasn't the scrutiny paid previously. One of the points I have heard which argue towards management practices is the long term practice of timber stand conversion. Softwood is a preferable fiber for papermaking and the long term return on softwood stands is better than hardwood. Thus logging cuts are actively managed to regenerate softwood arguably some of these stands might have regenerated into hardwood stands which would act as buffers, these buffers are no longer present so the impact of the budworm is worse. Irving timber has been very aggressive at timberstand improvement in New Brunswick and they are feeling the impact of the budworm significantly.

The reality is its a natural cycle that seems to have been around for awhile. On a centuries scale its just a blip but to a human who works on a day to day or at most a year to year time window, a 30 or 40 year event is forever. Few will believe that the Pemi was burned to the ground in the forties and fewer would believe that the Zealand so thoroughly burned in the early 1900s to the point where scientists were claiming that the soil was sterilized and trees would never grow again. The last epidemic coincided with the start of the whitewater boom in northern maine. The folks from Mass and elsewhere didn't even know of the budworm, they just knew that they were being bussed for miles over dusty logging roads through huge clear cuts. The guides tended to want to find something to talk about so they ascribed the desolation to the evil paper companies despite the fact that they were guests of those same companies on their lands. Eventually the paper companies figured it out and they made an attempt to explain forestry and salvage cuts but I expect it was too little too late.

By the way even Baxter State Park got hit the last time around. I found this older report on the web that has a lot of detail http://library.umaine.edu/MaineAES/TechnicalBulletin/tb121.pdf

I asked a BSP ranger about the patterns in the trees seen here from North Brother after I hiked it this summer. He said a combination of wind damage and the Spruce Bud Worm...

An update

http://bangordailynews.com/2015/12/...e-readies-for-new-battle-with-spruce-budworm/

sdways01 said:

I asked a BSP ranger about the patterns in the trees seen here from North Brother after I hiked it this summer. He said a combination of wind damage and the Spruce Bud Worm...

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Fir waves. Environmental effects, not so much from spruce bedworm, or so i was taught. Spruce budworm wouldnt leave ant standing timber.

egilbe said:

Fir waves. Environmental effects, not so much from spruce bedworm, or so i was taught. Spruce budworm wouldnt leave ant standing timber.

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You can see in the picture though that the trees are of different heights depending on which part of the patterns you are in. So it would be conceivable that the shorter trees are new growth growing up around dead trees that had been affected. I'm not discounting your thoughts either though as I have only been there once, only got info from one person (albeit someone that should be knowledgeable about the area), and didn't bushwhack into any of those areas to see what the trees look like up close.

The damage from budworm is far more noticeable than fir waves, image the same shot where the entire woods are brown and dead. If you look around on the web for images from out west for pine bark beetle images you will get an idea.

The fir waves are up in the boreal area and the studies I have read is that its a long term phenomena. There are fir waves in the whites and the ADKS there just has to be the right conditions. Here is a link that explains them http://facultyweb.cortland.edu/broyles/FBIO/Firwaves.pdf

For more photos of fir waves, see http://www.summitpost.org/fir-waves/220736 They have an obvious ripple shape and get more pronounced as you climb into the prevailing wind. Spruce budworm, from what I can tell, is unlikely to form neat bands, and thrives in less-windy spots.

BTW, the fir waves on the Brothers show up really nicely in sattelite imagery: http://mapper.acme.com/?ll=45.91366,-68.95500&z=16&t=S

I think the Brothers was the first spot they were noticed. They've been spotted elsewhere as was mentioned. Think of them as the ripples left in sand as water recedes on a beach, but with living trees, rather than grains of sand.

egilbe said:

I think the Brothers was the first spot they were noticed. They've been spotted elsewhere as was mentioned.

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Yes, I can't find my copy any more, but according to my notes, Sprugel's 1976 paper cites Caldwell's 1966 observations of fir waves on and near the Brothers as the first.

An update for potential epidemic in Maine
https://bangordailynews.com/2016/03...s-budworm-outbreak-could-harm-maines-economy/