A murderer’s corpse tells an ominous tale

The emerald ash borer. ED KANZE PHOTO

By ED KANZE

A nature writer with decades of books, magazine stories and newspaper columns under my belt, I confess to mostly writing about cheerful subjects. Mind you, there is plenty of dark, discouraging stuff to shine the light of hand-crafted prose on, but most of us see plenty of that. It has tended to be my working philosophy that we need to hear the good news as well as the bad. By paying a healthy portion of our attention to what’s beautiful in nature, and by celebrating it, we keep our spirits up and enjoy the good things that remain — a great many of them, I’m happy to say. 

On the present occasion, however, I am going to break the habit and call attention to a tragedy. The tragedy I have in mind is the voracious appetite of the emerald ash borer. This insect, a native of Asia, was first discovered doing damage to North American ash trees in and around Detroit, Mich., and neighboring Windsor, Ontario. The year was 2002. Its introduction was almost certainly accidental. Wooden pallets containing live emerald ash borer larvae were the likely means of delivery.

Most readers of this column possess far more firsthand knowledge than I do of this gorgeous but pestiferous insect. You live where the borer has been present for a decade and more. You’ve seen it move in and decimate ash trees that were standing there minding their own business. You have witnessed the multiplication of this exquisitely beautiful creature and its destruction of ash trees. Tens of millions of white, green, and black ashes have already succumbed. What fraction of our continent’s estimated 8 billion and more ashes will die remains to be seen. Efforts are being made by scientists and various government agencies to bring emerald ash borer numbers down. To date, as far as I know, successes have been modest.

In recent years, when I’ve been back in Westchester leading nature walks at the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation and the Croton Arboretum, I’ve seen firsthand what ash borers can do. Every ash I saw was either dead and standing or dead and rotting on the ground. A few lucky or resistant individuals escape the carnage, but not many. The loss is profound.

Where I live in the northern Adirondacks, we have watched with sympathy as the ashes of our neighbors to the north, east, south and west have been infested and destroyed. But until now, at least at our place, we have remained immune. Two species of ash, white and black, grow on our property. At the moment, they look lushly healthy and green.

But not for much longer, I fear. Yesterday I was walking toward our mudroom door when I noticed a bit of old spiderweb hanging beneath a light fixture. Tangled in the dusty silk was a beetle. It measured about a third of an inch, and it shimmered an iridescent metallic green. Egad! The borer is among us.

Those of us who love ashes, which are related to olive trees and among the most handsome, sturdy and useful of our forest plants, can do little more than weep and adjust to a new reality. Pest-control efforts are expensive and not practical for saving trees in large numbers. Efforts to rein in beetle numbers with parasitic wasps may work in the long run, but they offer little hope for the white ashes and black ashes on our 18 acres now. Woodpeckers, though, would have reason to lick their chops. A feast of beetle larvae surely looms ahead for them. Fungi will feast on ash cellulose and lignin. Spiders may benefit, too. The beetle I found dangling in a web had been sucked dry, perhaps by one of the orb weaving arachnids that call our house, so to speak, home. 

Fearing the worst, we have collected seeds from both kinds of ash at our place. Our thought is that after our ashes perish and the borers disappear with them, we can replant. Will it work? I don’t know. Better to try something, we figure, than to do nothing at all.