Echo

Early prevention urged to defeat emerald ash borer’s new larvae

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(OH) The Toledo Blade – Now’s the time to apply insecticide to ash trees you might be trying to save from a new crop of emerald ash borers.  

The sooner, the better. If you fail to spray ash trees by the end of June, you should wait until fall or the spring of 2010, said Amy Stone, Ohio State University extension agent in Toledo. More

Echo

Timber management company plants 550,000 seedlings

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(MI) Booth Newspapers – Some 550,000 seedlings have been planted in three areas of the Upper Peninsula, courtesy of Plum Creek Timber Co. The Seattle-based company, which owns and manages about 7 million acres of timberlands nationwide, planted nearly 263,000 seedlings in the Escanaba area, about 174,000 seedlings in the L’Anse area and nearly 120,000 jack pine seedlings northwest of Marquette. More

Wildlife

30,000 cormorants destroying lakeside park

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(ON) The Toronto Star- One arm of the Leslie Street Spit, home to Tommy Thompson Park and the Great Lakes’ largest colony of cormorants, looks like a wintry apocalypse. There are no trees now, just a few guano-spattered snags. This is where cormorants first settled in the park in 1990. They now number about 30,000. In some Ontario parks, Parks Canada officials shoot cormorants to stem the loss of trees.

Echo

Researchers find promising prospects to battle beech bark disease

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By Jack Johnston

LANSING — In the dead cold of the Upper Peninsula winter, Robert Heyd leaves his snowmobile and approaches an enormous American beech armed with a slingshot, rope and a saw. Supported by his snowshoes on four feet of snow, Heyd slings a quarter-pound weight attached to parachute cord 80 feet up into the highest branches of the behemoth and uses the rope to haul the 4-foot saw to the top. A branch falls harmlessly to the ground next to the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) forest health management program director. It’s a first step in saving the state’s majestic beeches. After eight years of research, the DNR and the U.S. Forest Service are ready to implement a strategy to fight the destructive beech bark disease, said Jennifer Koch, a research biologist with the Forest Service’s Northern Research Station in Delaware, Ohio.