nothin Boring Beetles Topple Big Ashes | New Haven Independent

Boring Beetles Topple Big Ashes

Aliyya Swaby Photo

Martindale at work.

Wood dust flew in all directions as Chris Martindale sawed down a sick ash tree near Greene Street in Wooster Square Park.

The city parks employee was the one doing the chopping, but the tall tree had already succumbed to the burrowing of a tiny green beetle.

More accurately, it had fallen to hundreds of them — emerald ash borers that get under the bark of ash trees and restrict needed water and nutrients from traveling up their trunks.

As the pestilence spreads across Connecticut and the country, New Haven is trying to contain the damage the epidemic could cause all here in the city — by chopping down infested trees before they rot and come down on their own.

A couple of Wooster Square neighbors are trying to get the city to spend more money spraying pesticides to prevent the beetles from burrowing, instead of cutting trees down once they are infected.

Neighbor Elsie Chapman said she and New Haven Garden Club’s Cordalie Benoit spoke with Becky Bombero, parks director, about saving the ash trees, but were told spraying the pesticides cost too much money to do regularly. Then they went to the parks commission and got a similar answer.

Chapman said she wants to know how the cost of cutting down a tree, grinding down the stump and sticking in a new tree compares to regularly treating an existing susceptible tree. Nobody can give that answer,” she said.

Contracting a company to spray three ash trees in Wooster Square park once this fall costs $550 total, she said. I’m not a botanist. I just want to do whatever we can, as much as we can. If we can’t save every tree in this city, at least we want to save these three in Wooster Park,” she said.

Other trees may not have that time. Ash borers dug into a row of trees on Artizan Street in Wooster Square.

Bombero said she will post a notice letting neighbors know they need to be chopped down. People can submit comments over the next 10 days, and any objections will result in a public hearing.

If no one objects, the trees will be flat wooden nubs come early August.

There is also no guarantee that a treated tree will survive more than a couple years more,” Bombero said in response to the question of relative costs. Not treating just accelerates when the removal and replacement will occur – it does not eliminate these costs. Ultimately all trees do need to be removed and replaced. This does not mean that we will not be treating trees, but with approximately 1,500 ash in New Haven it is not feasible to treat all these trees just to prolong the life expectancy.”

She said it costs the city on average $500 to remove a tree, $90 to stump it, and $400 to replace it. The average biannual treatment cost is $130-$150.

Martindale said he has his eye on another ash tree in the middle of Wooster Square. So far, it looks healthy, he said. But that can change quickly.

D-shaped holes mark the beetle.

He held up a cylinder of wood he cut down from the park’s tree. The beetles themselves eat the leaves, then lay eggs in crevices in the bark; when larvae are born they feed on two important sublayers of wood responsible for carrying nutrients up the tree and healing its tissue. That way, the tree ends up girdled,” constricted and disconnected from its food source — and unable to recover.

The beetles may have infested the young ash trees that line Winchester Avenue near the new Winchester Lofts complex — though Martindale can’t say for sure. I never thought it’d get this bad,” he said.

Originally from Asia, the ash borer was first detected in New Haven in 2014, in the part of the city that borders Hamden, said Kirby Stafford, chief entomologist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. We will never know exactly how it was first introduced to the state,” he said. But New Haven is among up to 90 towns in the state with sick ash trees.

The beetles can travel on their own, but more often hitch rides inside pieces of firewood that people carry across state borders. Ash trees make for very good firewood, Stafford said. People don’t think about it. They transport it all around,” he said.

It is currently illegal to transport firewood across Connecticut’s border, as part of an effort to curb the spread of invasive species.

Bark pulled up on Artizan Street.

Spraying the trees with pesticides regularly is an expensive process. They must be treated either every year or every two years, so the insecticide can be carried up into the tree’s upper limbs. But once the beetles have damaged the trees enough, the insecticide has no way to travel up — making it hard to save a noticeably infested tree. Once you have 50 percent damage, it’s too late,” Stafford said.

Early signs of a beetle invasion: the canopy of the tree loses its leaves. Later, d‑shaped wood-bored holes appear across the trunk.

Once an ash tree starts to rot, it disintegrates quickly, Stafford said. Branches start to fall off, risking the safety of people and property, he said. It’s easier to take down a tree before it has fully rotted, he said.

Row of potentially infested Winchester ash trees.

Martindale said he doesn’t know if the city will have to take down all the Winchester ashes. He said the city doesn’t regularly spray pesticide, likely because it’s a pricy budget line, at a time when every municipality is strapped for cash .. .We don’t have the tools or resources to do that.”

His director, Bombero, said neighbors might be able to help. They can contact the parks department to adopt a street tree and contract with a licensed arborist to spray trees in their neighborhood. We ask that they notify us so that we can update the tree inventory to reflect the treatment to assist in management decisions related to that tree and others in the area as the beetle does spread,” she said..

Chapman said she urged the parks department to spread that advisory to neighbors who are willing to put money on their love for the trees. She worries ash trees will go the way of elms, which were wiped out by beetle-born Dutch Elm Disease in the mid-20th century, and then were painstakingly brought back in the last several years. 

I just feel a need to speak for these trees that can’t speak for themselves. To watch them die like that is almost painful,” she said.

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