The big, pilated woodpecker, in his dress of red and black, was whacking away on a decadent cedar, chips flying, trying to get the grubs, as I strolled through a stand of mixed timber last week.
Our forests of trees, including the spruces, pines, birch, and fir we have in our backyards, are vital to our well being, providing shade, contentment, and home to an assortment of bird life.
Our forest trees absorb, and hold back melting snows. But some how, things are changing, and as climate change, and warming temperatures, affect all of us, the impact on trees has a direct bearing on our future as well. In dry seasons, trees can be stressed because of prolonged heat, due to lack of rainfall, however there are other factors that influence the well being of the mountainsides of timber we see each day in the beautiful Shuswap.
There are a variety of bugs that live in those trees, that can and do, have a direct impact on spruce, fir, hemlock and western larch lodgepole pine, similar to the pine beetle epidemic, a short while back, and the tussock moth outbreak, attacking young/old fir stands in the Falkland region a few years ago.
Most trees survived, but now we have a fir bark beetle targeting mature/blow down wood, and it’s estimated about 7,000 truck loads of fir are affected in the Malakwa Gorge/North Fork areas.
The beetles bore into the cambium layer, similar to the pine beetle, laying their eggs. The trees expel a secretion, but are overwhelmed. The result are hundreds of tiny orange bulbs, as the tree withers and becomes standing dead.
Birds, such as my buddy the woodpecker, flickers, finches, other birds make a living, cleaning out bugs in trees in the forest. John Stelfox a forest ecologist, years ago did a study in Lac La Biche by netting over one tree and leaving another natural. The netted tree, began to have insect infections. With the natural tree, birds had kept it healthy.
I suggest, for those concerned abut forest health, to read Andrew Nikiforuk’s book Empire of the Beetle where he describes how the pine beetle attacks trees, and with it the host of mites, fungi, and nine types of bacteria being transmitted.
Next week – we’ll have some fishing reports and fish and game club news
