dying white pines

While posting things with the media, I ran across this article about western white pines dying off all around Western Washington.

http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20090105/NEWS01/701059852#Why.are.the.white.pines.dying

The culprit seems to be "blue stain, a fungus that invades the sapwood of trees, clogging the conductive tissues." One theory is that beetles may be spreading the fungus from laying eggs in white pines. When the white pines are gone, the theory is the beetles could move on to other pines.

Sounds like there are a couple dedicated people trying to figure this out. It sounds so widespread that I wonder if it might be too little too late and that we'll be hearing more about this in the near future.

No one wants to put any money into it because the white pine isn't valuable.  They know it's spreading to other pines.

When it spreads to the Douglas fir, they will start to worry, and they'll have lost years of time that they could have been doing something, and didn't.

Sue

years ago a rust was killing white pines in our area and they destroyed all the currant and gooseberries to save the white pine..now the currant and gooseberries are starting to make a comeback (they are a host to the rust)

we have gone through a lot of tree die offs over the years..first i remember the elms to dutch elm disease when i was small and living on elm street..all the elms were replaced with sugar maples.

then it was the gypsy moth killing of oaks and other trees about 10 years ago they killed more than 1/2 of the oaks in our area.

then it was the ash tree borer...which is still a problem in many areas..they put a ban on crossing county lines with ash firewood.

now it is the army or tent worm, it has defoliated nearly all the deciduous trees in northern Michigan..not sure about other areas..if you don't protect your trees from them..you have no leaves in just a few days..we have been on battle mode here on our property.

good luck with your pines

Seca. dry,  in encinas.
Here the encinas have a problem they call "seca" "dry" I have a book on it that says that they don't die of one illness but of one problem here and another there.
      I wondered if there had not been some modernisation of farming tecnics in the last fifty years that have impoverished soils, hungry live things fall prey to illnesses more easily than well fed plants or animales.

    Reading about the farmed encinas, i have read two suggestions for bettering the system of growing them that would impoverished the soils.
    One suggestion was that the undergrowth cistus bushes and such should be cleared to reduce the competition for nutrients. Removing these bushes may reduce the competition for nutrients but it may also reduce the soil quality as there would be less plants to provide organic matter to the soil.
    Also permiculturists say that having different plants around allows things to grow better not worse in a suprising way as well as in many ways that can be explained, one thing i read here or affiliated to this forum said that if you plant lots of varieties of r¡ce in the same field the rice grows better, they don't know why as far as i could tell.

    The other proposition i read that could ha¡be a change for the worse twas the suggestion that it could be a good idea to plough under the trees so as to meteotorise the earth, I think the writer was young,  he said that ploughing would allow the ground to absorb more moisture so helping the plants.
      I would not have thought ploughing oculd help much to increase the capacity of th esoil to hold water but ploughing can release nitrogen that has been caught by the electormagnetic forces round very small bits of soil such as clay particles and this would give a boost to the trees but it could also damage the trees more superficial roots, trees have a lot of shallow roots.

    My observation of the ground makes me draw the conclusion that here they love herbicides and use them liberally, this could i suppose weaken these trees that provide fire wood, acorns as fattening and leaves as feed for the live stock.  agri rose macaskie

many varieties of pines die from auto pollution as well..if you notice that they'll die next to a road or a driveway..esp where people idle their vehicles..also there is a rust that is hosted by currants and gooseberries that kills white pines..

 
Brenda Groth writes on dying white pines near roads dying, I have seen the trees, by motorways here in Spain, go black and die and i have wondered if they died because of the salt they put on the roads in winter when there is snow or a heavy frost .
  More sinister ideas also occur to me, like, do they carry nuclear waste along these roads that killls these trees but salt seems to me the most likely because they actually spread it around roads.
      I have seen trees growing  better than the trees around them were there are places for people to stop their cars. I think that travelers probably fertilise the trees. 
  if cowmuck is full of heavy metals or has to be checked for heavy metals well i suppose one source of heavy metals would be the lead that before petrol was green was in exhaustsettleing on fields and being eaten by cows.   
      Exhaust from cars makes fruit ripen quicker, i have read. rose mackaskie.

Eastern white pines used to be a very valuable lumber tree, until they overcut them and now they don't ever reach decent lumber size. Leader borers and rust get them most times.

Being in Pennsylvania, one of the largest producers of hardwood lumber for centuries, we've had our share of disease and species issues.

American chestnut was the number one hardwood tree in the state at one time, and our house is full of chestnut woodwork, but the species is all but dead and gone, save a few small pockets scattered around the state.

I've forgotten how much this forum jogs my brain.

      If its beetles carrying fungi that kill the pines, then may not a reduction in birds be an important factor in increasing the incidence of the disease?  Insects eat insecticide and then birds eat insects and die and we kill birds like crows and magpies because they eat baby birds, they interfere with birds we shoot and eat but the corvidos are probably big insect eaters as well as meat eaters, big tent worm eaters and other insect eaters, foxes and small carnivores eat insects. Do snakes, do mice etc. ?
    You can go through mammals and bird books just looking at what they eat, thats how i discovered lizards eat violets seeds, going through the reptile book just reading what they eat.
  In china they have people that have a flock of long tailed magpies and take them to areas infested with tent worms. they were trained to follow the boy playing a pipe and get bakckk into to the van at the end of the day i suppose, i saw it n a chinese documentary on insects they had also caluculated how many tons of manure the insects produce.
    There were many more magpies here thirty years ago than there are now. I noticed it, because there were more here than there were in England.
      Maybe forestry commisions should look after the populations of corvidos.
      I had a about five jays in my garden eating the felllen peaches. An example of how variety of food makes sure you have a variety of predators, that control pests, a permacullture organics principal. I heard a lot of sqawking and look over the edge of the slope cautiously and a lot of jays flew off. I have never seen them in large numbers before. They aren't birds that hang around to be looked at. I have always seen them flying away. They hide nuts in the ground and forget some of them, they are good for forests.
    There used to be masses of kites but they prohibited the old village practice of having a village dump were all the waste from small villages was dumped, the village doctors were meant to decide on the position of the village dump. We shuold have false dumps in every village. I suppose were there is a dump there will be mice and rats and scraps. i never see kites anymore and before i saw several on every journey i took in the car. They were everywhere.
  Sir albert howards priciple is of return return everything to nature. We eat such a lot if e throw out our scraps the animals can at least benefit from our scraps. if we have dumps then we return poisonouse things like batteries as well as scraps.
      We kill mice and rats and such and clean up on dirty rotting meat so doing for the survival of birds of prey.
    Small birds like nut hatches and tree creepers eat the insects off tree trunks.
    Pines are monocultures, too many pines in one place makes for a proliferation of the illnesses that can attack them .
they you start to have  less genetic variety than that which would exist in  a natural forest? The great variety of trees in the natural juniper forests here are noticeable. There are trees of different growth habits, pendular and such, of a very tight growth pattern or a loose one.  A reduction in genetic variety would mean a reduction in the species ability to defeat a desease.  Elms were usually taken vegetively all from the same parent in counties in England i read and they fell prey to elm disease .
   
    Fungi perfecti says that cauliflower fugi that is a bit parasitic, gets rid of honey  fungi i can't that is very parasitic and kills trees, you innoculate a rope and make a groove round a tre and tie the ropse into the  groove  making a groove all round  atree kills it. you can do it round a tree stump you can eat this mushroom but it takes up arsenic fromth ehabitat so don't eat it a ¡in habitats with arsenic in the soil. They are going to try innoculating trees on the edge of forests wiht this fungi to see if it chases away other fungies from the wood. From the book "Mycelium Running" Paul Stamets . So fungi remediation. can be possible, one fungi against another.

  What does fungi perfecti or a representative of him think of this. If the pines are attacked by blue root fungi he should reply on this one. agri  rose macaskie.
 

dvmcmrhp52 wrote:American chestnut was the number one hardwood tree in the state at one time, and our house is full of chestnut woodwork, but the species is all but dead and gone, save a few small pockets scattered around the state.

Thankfully, they've bred some nearly-pure American chestnut trees (I think 1/16 or so Asian) that are resistant, and are beginning to re-plant.

It will be very nice to have that resource again in a generation or two.

I did not think there were american chestnut trees. They have problems with chestniuts here to.

Pines close to roads in our area die from salt spray in winter.
We have some pine beetles but their damage hasn't become noticeable on a large scale.

We do have Beech fungus that gets a toehold through aphid damage. Those trees are dying quickly and much more apparent than the white pines.
I have hundreds of WP on my property from buying & planting seedlings throughout the years. There are wild red currants 500' upwind away and these 2 plants have co existed for 20 years. It may be that the currants are not hosts for white pine blister rust in this location at this time. I was aware of the relationship when I began planting the WP. I'd hate to see the WP die off; it would mean replanting another type of evergreen.

Why would you have to replant evergreens you could plant decidiouse trees?
    I suppose evergreens sequestra more carbon because they sequestar all winter as well as all summer.
  Sepp holzers place was a response to a pine desert or some such phrase i am not sure of all th eins and outs of what is wrong with pines how they are not very good for soilos but h too many people atlk of it for me to think that there must not be somethign in it.
  the romantic painters started a big fashion fo rmountain scenery an dpines . for canada and such.
    Are pines important economically because it is easy to cut their wood?
  There are so many pine woods that it is hard to worry about them but then they form no part of my childhood i just liked cedar trees. People often like like wha they new so i have to make an effort to sympathise with a loss of pines i have to remember how thigns you have liked pull you an dhow sad it is to lose them. rose.

My white pines are interstate road screen for me. Mine are far enough back so they aren't impacted by road salt. Deciduous trees don't have the blocking ability. The bulk of my woodlands is deciduous, so I am not lacking those and can see that they don't work for blocking. I did have the soil from the excavation of my pond mounded but we are only allowed to mound so high according to zoning. The pines are on top and sides of the 600' long mound. They are an effective screen.
They smell wonderful, I have all the greens I need for the holidays; I guess it isn't always about board timber. 

i can understand about a screen and really i can understand about liking them i know a pine wood here an dits beautifulol with red and orange bits in the trunks and really long trunks.
I like differetn types of woods i never realised the olive groove i new in greece was a sort of open wood each ttype of wood gives a special experience.
      Here i feel that pines are so much the best money crop though tthere is also the love of pine forest born as i said from stories of Canada and Romantics, that all other ttypes of woods will get lost. I supopose there valoue as the only in europe marketable wood th eonly wood wood yards are use dto using nearly is the most to blame for them threatening to agri rose macaskie