Nature Notes: An Army at the Ready

March is a stone’s throw away. Let’s hope the stone doesn’t fall on a sheet of ice. The female of the bald eagle pair at Wertheim in Shirley is already incubating eggs. Great-horned owls chicks have probably hatched. If March is a good spirit, we can count on the following to show up: grackles, red-winged blackbirds, robins, crocuses, wild onions, alewives, spring peepers, ospreys, and piping plovers, in roughly that order. 

But then comes April and the ticks, gypsy moths, and other scourges that can put a cold blanket on spring. One of them, an army waiting to attack the South Fork with a fury that will make the gypsy moths pale by comparison, is poised for action on the west side of the Shinnecock Canal. 

The southern pine borer that has been devastating pitch pine trees in the Central Pine Barrens including in Westhampton and Hampton Bays, leaving pitch pines mere skeletons from Long Island Sound to the Great South Bay next to the ocean. Unless the South Fork pine trees receive miracle relief from on high, they will go from green to brown, needled to needle-less in a few short months.

Perhaps, this pine borer is just another invader from the south following the tracks of the lone star tick as we warm up and become subtropical in nature over time. Ticks can only walk or hop rides on birds or vehicles to get here; the adult pine borers can fly. Oddly, not only is this marauder spreading north, it has also been moving southerly into Central America all the way to Panama and wreaking havoc with the pines there. Keep in mind that monarch butterflies overwinter in Mexican pines, so now there’s another danger that could further deplete their numbers.

On Monday I visited the large Hubbard Creek County Park on both sides of Red Creek Road, which twists through the Good Ground part of Hampton Bays west of the canal. About 10 acres of pitch pines there, the “eastern front,” as it were, were felled and piled along side of the road. They were cut down fairly recently as some of the needles on the less diseased ones were still green. The largest trunks were 50 to 60 feet long and 18 inches in diameter.

The rings on some of the stumps could be easily counted and I aged some 10 stumps that ranged from 50 to more than 90 years old. Interestingly, each of the older stumps had six to eight annuli crowded closely together, and when I counted back from this year to reach them, it turned out that those tightly congested rings were from the 1960s, a time when Long Island was undergoing a record number of extremely droughty years.

To get to Red Creek Road from the east, one takes the Sunrise Highway to Hampton Bays and the exit to Route 24, which runs north through Flanders and connects to Riverhead. One can see on both sides of the connector road a large number of tall pitch pines without needles and with last year’s pinecones that clearly have given up the ghost. The only ones with green needles are the ones on the shoulder that are less than 10 feet tall, that is, sapling pitch pines, less than 10 years old.

I hurried back to the best stands of pines east of the canal, which range through the moraine from North Sea to Three Mile Harbor. I drove up and down every road to check the status of the pitch pine and white pine forest, which in some areas provides as much as 75 percent of the tree cover, much more than the next most populous trees, the oaks. There are two roads that run along the top of the moraine in Southampton Town from North Sea to Sag Harbor — Great Hill Road and Middle Line Highway. The pines there were as tall as 70 feet and all had green needles. I didn’t spy a single dead pine through the windshield.

Then I covered just about every road in Northwest Woods in East Hampton Town, beginning at Sagg Road, then Swamp Road all the way to Old Northwest Road, from the bay on the north to Stephen Hand’s Path and the farm fields on the south. Some of the white pines in this area, say on either side of Bull Path, are close to 100 feet tall. Some of the pitch pines more than 75 feet tall. All had needles in abundance and all the needles were green.

However, my assurances that our South Fork pines were healthy and in good stead were solely based on my drive-by observations. What I couldn’t see by that method of observation were whether or not some of the trees that looked fine were already infested. It takes a full growing season to turn an infected, healthy-looking pine into a gray ghost.

Unfortunately, we will not be able to tell until it is already too late. And there is no quick efficient antidote to save such pines once they are infested by the beetle. The adult beetles lay eggs under the bark and the larvae work their way up and down and around the boles, feeding on the sap with the nutrients that flow up and down through the xylem and phloem layers.

Ironically, a great number of these good-looking trees are probably infested with our native pine borer, but this large beetle has worked out a peace with its host trees; it feeds and burrows but to a much lesser degree and very rarely kills a host tree. In a sense, it is more a symbiotic relationship than a parasitic one that has been worked out between beetle and tree over the course of thousands of years.

Our annual invasion from New York City and points west is a good four months away; the invasion by gypsy moths and the southern pine borer is right around the corner! 

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].