The mountain pine beetle, after two decades of wreaking destruction on the mountain-rooted pine trees of Colorado, is dwindling.
The mountain pine beetle, after two decades of wreaking destruction on the mountain-rooted pine trees of Colorado, is dwindling.
The mountain pine beetles were active on 1.2 million acres in the state when the population peaked in 2008. But figures in 2013 show the scourge population has plummeted, now only active on 97,000 acres. Why? Because they ate themselves into decline.
"They ate themselves out of house and home," Joe Duda, deputy state forester for the Colorado State Forest Service, told 9News.
The beetles have eaten all the pine trees that, because of warmer temperatures, were stressed and unable to defend themselves from the beetle. The landscape now includes expanses of pine trees with dead needles. What now?
"Our focus now is what do we want those future forests to look like, and what can we do to build some resilience into the system?" Duda said, adding, "the decisions we make today will have consequences for the future forests in 50 to 100 years, so we want to choose wisely."
If the Forest Service wants to remove the beetle-killed pine, they may find friends with wood products manufacturers. Already, companies in the industry have gone into forests sacked by the beetle, taken out the dead wood and milled it into something useful, like flooring. Sometimes dubbed “blue pine” or “denim pine,” the wood has “significantly more defects, like cracking, checking and bug holes,” Ryan Palma of Sustainable Lumber Co. told HF’s Green Blogger Elizabeth Baldwin, that make for a unique look.