ShareThisBy KATHERINE HARDING
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
They blew by the millions into the dense forests surrounding this thriving northwestern Alberta community on a strong wind in July.
There were so many that a dairy farmer thought he was hearing rain tapping on his barn's tin roof.
Instead, it was an invasion of hungry mountain pine beetles, black grain-sized insects that have already devoured billions of mature lodgepole pine trees in British Columbia's forests.
"We just had this massive blow-over from the Prince George area. ...We never thought they would hit us this hard, this fast," said Pat Wearmouth, a senior forester with Weyerhaeuser Co. Ltd. The giant forestry company is scrambling to help control the infestation, which has the potential to keep marching east through Canada's vast northern boreal forest.
Behind Wearmouth is a forest full of dying Jack and lodgepole pine trees. Many of the lanky infected trees _ some taller than a four-story building _ have been tied in pink caution tape that reads: "Pest mgmt. zone."
The full extent of the outbreak near Grande Prairie, a small city northwest of Edmonton, won't be known until next year, when sick green trees start turning a rusty red _ a sure sign they have fallen victim to mountain pine beetles. Soon after that, the trees turn gray.
While the infestation has been slowly spreading across the Rocky Mountains into Alberta since 2002, the recent outbreak in Grande Prairie and surrounding areas profoundly worries the forestry industry and provincial government because the beetle is heading farther north than it was expected to go.
There is also evidence that the beetle, which once favored mature lodgepole pine, is now attacking the mature Jack pine of the boreal forests, which reach from British Columbia to Labrador.
"There's a chance that Alberta could look like B.C., and so could a lot of Northern Canada where there is pine," Wearmouth said.
Wearmouth, a big, burly, bearded 58-year-old dressed in jeans and a blue-and-black bomber jacket, has been a forester since 1971. He partly blames global warming and the lack of cold winters for the destruction the tiny pest has been able to inflict on Western Canadian forests in recent years.
"Mother Nature needs to give us a really good winter because I'm pretty convinced that that is the only way we are really going to get it," he said.
Mountain pine beetles are equipped with a built-in antifreeze system to survive harsh winters; historically, however, the beetles have been no match for Western Canada's cold.
But warmer winters and fewer cold snaps in the spring and fall have allowed them to thrive. Each infected pine tree can produce enough beetles to infect another 10 to 12 pine trees.
Even David Coutts, Alberta's minister of sustainable resource development, is kept awake at night over this growing crisis, which has been likened to a silently spreading forest fire. "They have gone into places that we never thought they would go...," he said.
