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Beetles feasting on state's trees
Herald Staff Writer
Eighty percent of an acre can be lost. Sometimes it's every single tree."
- Mike Blakeman, public affairs officer, Rio Grande National Forest
After all, older, bigger trees are a better meal, he said.
"Bark beetles always pick off the older trees because they're a larger food supply," Dallison said Friday.
Nevertheless, he would like to see more old-growth ponderosa pine and mixed conifers in Southwest Colorado.
Dallison isn't sure what role climate change plays in the findings of the U.S. Geological Survey report on 52 years of old-growth die-off across the West.
"Trees have been affected by drought," said Dallison, who didn't know of a Friday article in Science. "But maybe it's just drought and not
climate change.
"Trees are picked off a few at a time," he said. "I don't know whether the rate is increasing."
But he pointed to the huge loss of spruce to beetle attacks in the Rio Grande National Forest immediately to the east.
After 30 years on the job, Mike Blakeman, public affairs officer for the Rio Grande, knows the terrain like the back of his hand.
Beetle attacks on spruce in the Weminuche Wilderness have reached "landscape scale," Blake-man said Friday. Beetles usually attack trees at least 14 inches in diameter but now are going after some with 5-inch diameters, he said.
"Eighty percent of an acre can be lost," Blakeman said. "Sometimes it's every single tree."
In 2008, aerial surveys found 64,000 acres across Colorado had been attacked by the spruce beetle, Blakeman said. Stands of spruce in Hinsdale and Mineral counties, shared by San Juan and Rio Grande national forests, bore the brunt.
In Mineral County, 34,000 of the 79,000 acres of spruce ravaged by the beetle from 1996 through 2008 occurred last year. In Hinsdale County for the same time period, 12,000 acres of 52,000 acres of beetle-eaten spruce occurred last year.
La Plata and Archuleta counties got off easy. Out of 4,400 acres of spruce in La Plata County hit by beetles from 1996-2008, 140 acres were attacked last year. In Archuleta County, it was 1,200 acres last year and 4,500 in the 12-year period.
"We haven't seen a disturbance in a long time," Blakeman said. "It's a natural process that can happen every 150 to 200 years."
Forest devastation isn't uncommon. A piñon beetle plague occurred a few years ago and lodgepole pine are being wiped out in Northern Colorado.
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