ALB: The first tree

The first tree in the battle fell at approximately 10:30 this morning.

By now, we know the reality of the Asian Long-Horned Beetle invasion. Within the next few months, our city landscape is going to begin to be irrevocably transformed and – in the short term – it’s not for the better.

Still, seeing the first tree come down is a tangible reminder of exactly what we’re facing.

This morning, about a dozen USDA, DCR, and city forestry workers converged on a lone maple tree on lower Ararat Street, across the street from St. Gobain’s main facility, next to the storage units, to cut down and analyze the tree that officials say is the most infested one they have found so far. It’ll be the only tree to come down before this fall’s first frost, they say.

(Pictures of the tree and the damage after the break)

As USDA researchers kneeled beside sectioned limbs pockmarked with hundreds of open and “scabbed” holes, city forestry workers pulled down the main trunk of the tree and fed pieces not destined for the lab through a chipper. Workers pulled decapitated beetle heads, and ¾ inch pieces of larvae out of holes.

Al Sawyer, the lead USDA scientist on scene, said that by looking at the number of holes, the amount of healing/scabbing on old holes, the number of total trees (over 760 so far) and the dispersal distance, he should be able to tell how long the beetles have been in town.

Sawyer is now carting sections of the tree he wants to look at closer back to his lab in eight tightly sealed barrels, separated by where on the tree they came from, but says that he believes on an initial scan that the beetles have been here for 5 years, give or take a year or so. He downplays the significance of reports that a beetle has been in the hands of a Worcester exterminator for 11 years, saying that “we still don’t know where it came from.”