If you took a survey to determine the most unpopular insect in the Rocky Mountains, the answer might well be not the disease-carrying wood tick, but the mountain pine beetle.
Actually, it wouldn’t even be close, because the tick is an eight-legged arachnid, like a spider, rather than a six-legged insect. And it’s the pine beetle that has laid waste to thousands of acres of forest in southern Wyoming and northern Colorado.
Dead trees killed by beetles in Colorado.
After beetles infest a tree, it begins to die. The needles go from green to a rusty hue, then fall off. The tree begins to rot, and eventually it will fall unless fire gets it first.
So there’s increased fire danger, as well as the hazards posed by falling trees. It doesn’t help tourism when the once-green hills have turned a reddish brown. And there’s not much anybody can do about it once a forest is infected .
But eventually, the forests will be healthier. That’s the word from Greg Aplet of the Wilderness Society, speaking recently at a “Forests at Risk” conference in Aspen.
Although pine beetles attack many species of trees, they’ve really hit lodgepole pine in the southern Rockies. And those stands of crowded trees likely represent an unhealthy monoculture that developed as a result of the mining booms of the 1880s.
Mines swallow timber for pit props, and smelters and related industries used wood for fuel until the railroads arrived with coal. Lumberjacks denuded hillsides to meet the demand, leaving slash that often burned.
Lodgepole cones open with the heat from forest fires, so they reseed more quickly than other trees. As Aplet explained it, that’s why there was so much lodgepole between 80 and 120 years old in the southern Rockies. That led to a crowded forest dominated by one species, and thus easy pickings for millions of pine beetles.
The forests will come back after this epidemic, he says, but they’ll likely look different — not as many large trees and a greater diversity of species. “Life will find a way. It just may not be the life we’re used to.”
Essays in the Range blog are not written by High Country News. The authors are solely responsible for the content.
Ed Quillen is a freelance writer in Salida, Colo.
Photo courtesy Flickr user Patrick.
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