By Alice Rossignol and Rachael Gleason
Editor’s note: Great Lakes SmackDown! Terrestrial Terror is an on going Great Lakes Echo series.
One hundred percent of pollsters voted for the European starling. Nineteen percent of bracketeers voted for the songbird and 5 percent voted for the beech scale. The remaining votes went to species that have already dropped from the competition.
But it’s time for the starling to fly the coop because the Echo referees went with the beech scale.
Why? Because in true March madness style, upsets happen.
Just like how Villanova took down Georgetown in 1985 or when North Carolina beat Houston in 1983, the beech scale takes down the European starling in 2011.
Starlings are pervasive, contaminate food and water and bully native cavity-nesting birds. But the bird must have not been on its A-game last week because the beech scale is moving on to the finals.
With its fighting skills of killing beeches with the help of a fungal side-sick, this last land brawl between The Bark Butcher and The Green Menace will be an insect showdown.
Love the smackdown. Good stuff. Sadly with beech bark disease, there won’t be any beeches left. Beeches don’t fruit until they reach about 40 years of age, and the scale/disease will kill them before they get there. Unlike dutch elms disease that killed off most mature trees but still you can often see smaller elms in many woods, I think this one really does have a chance of extirpating a very large and important mast crop in our northern woods. Those beeches also interestingly used to be very important roosting trees for the passenger pigeons…. my guess is that they will be found together in the history books.