- All right, good evening everyone.
My name is Bill Klase.
I'm a UW-Extension Natural Resources Educator.
Tonight we're gonna be talking about
those things that are killing our trees out there.
We'll look at some of
the signs and symptoms of the things
that are killing our trees,
and we'll be able to identify some of those.
We'll talk about some of the worst things
that are out there.
We'll talk a little bit about who you can contact to get help.
Those people are out there and they're free,
so I encourage you to reach out to them,
even if you just have a question.
Some of the things we're not gonna talk about
are the insects and diseases that
are very common in our woods that are out there all the time
that don't really cause a problem.
This is a good example of that.
This is the eastern tent caterpillar.
Can you guess why it's called the eastern tent caterpillar?
It creates a little tent that it rears its young in.
It's common in Wisconsin's forests,
and the forests of the northeastern part
of the country and the continent.
It's not really that damaging.
It will eat a lot of the leaves on a tree,
but overall it's not as bad as things like
gypsy moth, and emerald ash borer, and oak wilt,
some of the things you may have heard of already.
I'm not gonna talk about these.
Those things are out there.
They do cause damage,
but, overall, the native Predators
that are out there do a good job
of controlling their populations,
but there are things that are out there that are really bad that we have problems with
because there's no natural predators
are the ones that we're gonna talk about tonight.
Here are your steps to having a healthy forest.
This is a good one: Learn what's out there,
and why they're problematic and where they are,
and what the signs and symptoms are,
and be able to evaluate your forest as a whole,
and not just think about one tree that looks sick.
Ask for some assistance.
There's professionals out there. Usually they're free.
And keep your forests healthy.
All right, that's it for the evening.
Thanks for coming guys. (laughter)
No, we'll go into more detail.
The key for keeping your forests healthy,
and the characteristics of a healthy forest
are that it has many plant species,
a lot of diversity.
I'm going to mention that a lot through tonight's lecture
that there's a lot of diversity in a forest.
It's resilient to the attack of maybe one kind
of pest, or insect, or disease.
The more diversity you have in your forest,
the better off you'll be.
If it's not crowded, too,
that the trees have space to grow,
so they're not stressed
because they're all fighting for the same resources.
Stressed trees tend to attract insects and diseases,
and be susceptible to those things.
It's complex that you have a variety of different species,
and you have shrubs and groundcover
along with big trees and small trees.
All that diversity tends to attract wildlife
that eat the insects that are attacking our trees,
and it meets your management objectives.
That's the key one. It always should be, "What are your goals?"
should be the first thing you ask,
and then trying to keep your forest healthy
is part of those goals, overall.
There's a lot of tools you can use
to keeping your forest healthy.
You can thin your forest,
so that you make room for your good trees to grow,
so that they stay healthy and resilient.
Rotation age is a fancy term that foresters use.
It just means that the trees have reached
their economic maturity, and so you should harvest them,
or their maturity so that after that point
they continue to grow,
but their growth is really slowed,
and so that's the age that it's
a good time to harvest your trees.
For some trees it can be 100, 200 years.
For other trees it can be, like, 40 years,
and aspen is a good example of that.
There's some really old aspen out there,
but we usually harvest it around 40 years
because that's when it's most mature,
it reaches its highest value,
and after that it's gonna start to decline a bit.
Choosing the right species
for the site is a good thing to do.
Match the trees that you want on your property
with the soil type you have, and the conditions you have.
A good example might be that I live in Rhinelander,
and I live on a sandy soil.
A bad idea would be to try to grow walnut there,
which prefers southern climes, and richer soil.
That's a really bad choice.
The trees wouldn't do well,
and the trees that do survive would
probably be attacked by insects and diseases.
It's good idea to leave some of
those dead and dying trees out there.
Not a lot, just a few
because they tend to attract things like
woodpeckers and other, and flying, other birds.
Flying birds, there's a redundant thing,
Other birds that eat insects.
Those are great things
because they'll attack the insects that are eating,
or feeding on your trees.
You want a few of those out there, but not too many.
If you do have an infestation you might need to do
what's called an eradication cut.
Get rid of those trees, get them off your property
so that the insects and diseases that
are on there don't infect the rest of your forest.
All these tools you might be able to do yourself,
but I encourage you to use a forester
to help you to make sure you get exactly
what you need done out of it, and it works well.
Now we're going to put on
our deerstalker cap, is that right?
Is that what Sherlock Holmes wears, a deerstalker cap?
Someone told me last night and I forgot already.
You're gonna be able to figure out
based on the things that you see going on,
you might be able to figure out what's going on in your forest.
There's a lot of things to consider.
What kind of tree is it?
What are the things you're seeing
in the way of signs and symptoms?
What's going on with the leaves and needles,
and the branches and the trunk?
Can you see death, or mushrooms growing out of the roots?
Can you actually find some insects on there?
What's going on with the site?
There's a lot of things to consider,
and we'll talk about each of these.
One big thing to consider is that
you need to look beyond just one symptom
because that might not be
the sole source of what's going on.
You might see leaves wilting,
but it might not be a leaf disease,
it might be something going on with the roots,
or there might be something going on, maybe some big machinery
you had on your property had killed the roots,
and that's what's killing the tree,
even though it looks like something's eating
the leaves on your tree.
You have to think about your site as a whole,
and what's been going on over the past few years.
It might be something else beyond
just an insect or disease.
If you had planted the trees,
a very common thing is we improperly plant trees,
and so, that can kill a tree
just as fast as a deer eating it.
I'll talk a little bit more about planting a tree,
and how to do it correctly, so that the trees grow well.
Here's an example of why you need to think about,
and know your trees that are out there.
This is a white pine, and you see in the middle there
there are some yellow needles, right?
Your first reaction might be, like,
that doesn't look healthy.
Something's going on there. These leaves are turning yellow.
That doesn't seem right.
A healthy tree, it's an evergreen tree,
it should have green needles all the time, right?
But actually, that's a common occurrence with pine species
that they don't keep their needles forever.
They last about two to three years,
and then they drop them.
Either because the needles have gotten too old,
or they're too shaded, so that's just commonly
the needles will turn yellow on white pine like this,
and they'll drop, just to make room
for the young needles coming in.
It may look like there's something wrong with the tree,
but actually it's perfectly all right.
The more you know about your trees,
and watch what's going on,
the more you'll be able to see that this is okay.
There's nothing wrong with this,
and this is just a natural thing.
All right so here,
I talked about signs and symptoms.
Here's how we define them.
A symptom is the response of the tree
to something that's attacking it.
It might be the needles turning a different color,
or the leaves turning a different color, or wilting.
The sign is actually the pest itself.
It might be a mushroom. It might be the insect.
It might be the insect,
or the damage done by the insect,
like the galleries underneath the bark.
I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute.
Let's go through a few of these.
You can see the needles on this spruce
are kind of turning brown.
You might think, "What's going on there?
"What kind of damage could that be?"
There's a couple of possibilities.
Is it possible that there was too much fertilizer,
or you planted them in the wrong site,
and there's not enough fertilizer in the soil
for the tree to do well,
or maybe there's some kind of fungal disease?
There's a number of different things that could cause
the needles to turn color like this.
Maybe the leaves are wilting, like in this aspen.
That could be frost damage,
or, again, it could be some kind of fungal disease,
but seeing that and identifying what the damage is,
is the first step in this process.
Or maybe there's some kind of deformity in the trunk.
This is a good-looking canker on here, isn't it?
It's got a lot of character, right?
It's very much more interesting than
a perfectly straight tree that has no damage,
but this is pretty, obviously,
something is wrong with this tree.
It's not growing very well,
and it probably won't do very well in the long run.
Now we talked about the signs.
It can take a lot of different forms.
In this picture, you can see the egg mass
for a gypsy moth.
Also, you can see some of the larvae
coming out of that egg mass.
In the lower left-hand corner
is the pupil case for the gypsy moth,
so that's something to keep an eye out for.
Those egg masses are pretty common
on trees that are infested with gypsy moth.
It's one of those signs to keep an eye out for
in case you're worried that
gypsy moths might be attacking your forest.
Another thing you can look out for
is these insect tunnels.
This is damage caused
when an insect, or a larvae feeds underneath the bark,
in the growing tissue right underneath
the bark called the cambium.
That's a really rich, nutritious area of the tree.
The insects are eating that,
and they create these tunnels, or galleries,
like in this picture.
This is from a pine engraver beetle.
It's a very common kind of,
or I should say that each insect has
a distinct kind of gallery they create
in the way they feed.
When I show you a picture of the emerald ash borer that
the gallery is very different than this one.
Frass is insect poop.
That's what you can see in the picture.
That's a little bit of sawdust, too.
You can find that too, when you're looking,
like, you might see the tree dying,
and you pull the bark off, and you see the galleries,
and a little bit of sawdust and poop.
That's what you might be seeing,
and a hole, like in this picture,
is a good indication of some kind of insect
has bored into the tree,
or bored out of the tree as it became an adult.
That's a good thing to keep an eye out for.
In some cases there's so many holes
it looks like the tree was shot with a shotgun,
and it's all little holes from shot.
Some of the holes are very distinctive in shape.
Some of them are shaped like a "D"
and some of them are very round.
The D-shaped hole is very
characteristic of a couple insects that I'll talk about.
Or maybe you see the cankers,
or the fruiting body of the mushrooms,
or the fungus that's growing in a tree.
This doesn't look very obvious that it's a mushroom,
but, in fact, that little bit of yellow
on the side of that aspen is the fruiting body
of a certain kind of hypoxylon canker.
It doesn't seem like it's much,
but that can be killing the tree pretty readily.
The picture in the top, the tree is snapped over,
and your first thought might be,
"That looks like it was wind damage,"
but in fact, the tree was probably healthy
before it was infected with the mushroom
in the picture in the bottom.
This particular fungus infests
the whole part of the tree, and so that weakens the stem,
so it's very easy for it to be
snapped over by the wind because of that.
Really characteristic for this particular fungus.
Location of the damage is also another clue
that will help you figure out
what's causing the damage to your tree.
Like in this picture you can see
the leaves in the lower part of the tree
are starting to fall off or disappear.
That's usually an indication of some kind of leaf infection
because the bottom part of the tree
is where the highest humidity is,
and that's good conditions for growing
different kinds of leaf-damaging diseases and fungus.
Now if the leaves and needles are dying at the top,
it could be a number of different things.
It could be root damage.
Maybe from drought,
or maybe from some kind of root disease.
Or it could be something eating the top part of the leaves,
the insects that like to be in the sun.
In this red pine stem you can see
the tops of the trees are kind of getting thinner,
or it can be some kind of fungal wilt,
like in this picture.
Anybody have oak wilt on their property?
I'm sorry to hear that.
You might have seen a picture like this
or seen oak trees like this on your land.
If you've got expanding pockets of dying trees that can be
something completely different.
It could be a fungal root infection from
a number of different agents
that are out there that can be killing your trees.
It could be armillaria, oak wilt, annosum,
dutch elm disease,
depending on what species you have,
and what that expanding pocket looks like.
It could be any one of those.
It could even be something like
bark beetles if it's a pine tree.
Now if you've got damage to many different species of trees,
it could be something that you did inadvertently.
In these pictures we have a white pine, a hemlock,
and a balsam fir that have damage.
The needles are all turning brown.
Doesn't seem right that something
would attack a bunch of different trees,
and what happened in this case
is that the person was spraying buckthorn
with an herbicide on a windy day,
and herbicide spread, and killed these other trees,
so it was something that person did
rather than an insect, or a disease.
All of these are more things to consider.
Don't just say, "I've got a tree dying."
Think about what's going on.
If you can find any of the signs or symptoms
of what kind of damage it is, where the damage is
will tell you a lot about what it might be,
and not just, "My needles are turning brown,
"it's gotta be this."
There's more of a bigger story than just that.
Knowing the site history is important, too.
You might have had heavy equipment
on your property for whatever reason,
or maybe you had animals grazing on it beyond deer.
There could be some weather damage.
There's all kinds of different things
that can lend to this story
that's going on on your property.
In this particular case it looks like
the top of the trees were just snapped off,
like it was just a wind damage,
but, in fact, there was a lot going on on the site.
Here's the sequence of what happened.
The first year it had a really heavy drought,
so the trees were already stressed by that drought,
they survived, and then the next four years
there was an insect infestation that
was defoliating the trees, and somehow they survived.
Then the year after that there was another drought,
and still they survived.
They were growing very slowly.
You can see they're kind of stunted trees,
so when a strong wind came through,
it snapped the trees right off.
Your first thought might be wind damage,
but there's a lot going on here that led
to those trees being stressed, and weakened so that
they're susceptible to wind damage because most trees should be able
to handle some heavy wind.
Really heavy wind is different.
Knowing if there has been big infestations in the past.
This good-looking bug here is the forest tent caterpillar.
It's got some really distinctive features on it.
It you look, some people say,
if you look at the pattern on its back,
some people say those are footprints,
kind of going up its back, or keyholes on their back.
Really it's a native species I mentioned
at the beginning of the presentation.
It's common in our forests.
It's there all the time, but every six to 10 years,
or six to 16 years, their population just explodes.
You can see in the graph that in the early Aughts,
they had a really big population boom,
so we're kind of due for another of these soon,
but they're around all the time,
they're just in low population levels.
What happens is that they get this big population boom,
and then all of a sudden there's all these predators out there
that are just munching them up,
and their population crashes again.
All right, so let's go through some of
the insects and diseases that are out there
that are problems.
You can see we'll talk about these other things as well,
that are affecting your trees.
Poor planting is there at the bottom.
I don't mean to imply that you plant trees poorly.
There was a lot of P's in that statement,
but there's simple things you can do
that can make tree planting very successful.
In general, we like to call things pests,
but, in fact, there's only a very small percentage
of the insects and diseases out there
that are really a problem.
Less than one percent.
There's hundreds, if not thousands,
of insects in our forests.
Most of them are very benign,
and do, generally,
a benevolent job out there.
They provide food for wildlife,
and they break down matter,
so that it decomposes faster.
Only a small percentage are a problem.
I'm gonna be plugging this website a lot,
the DNR website.
You can do a search.
Type in "forest health" in the search bar.
That section of the DNR website
has a lot of great information.
A lot more detailed information about
each of these pests I'm gonna talk about.
I encourage you if you want to get
some more detailed information to go there.
I'm gonna be mentioning this a couple times
throughout the presentation.
It's dnr.wi.gov
and type in "forest health."
A lot of great information.
For insects, there's all kinds of
different ways we categorize them.
How they feed, you know, what they're feeding on,
what stage they're in.
All these things help us to identify what they are,
and if we need to worry about them or not.
Let's start with those insects that eat
that part right underneath the bark.
We call those girdling insects
because as they chew on that growing tissue
right underneath the bark,
they end up killing the tree by all that growing tissue,
in that living tissue is what transports
water up from the roots and nutrients
down to the roots, and if you cut that off you're basically
choking the life out of the tree,
and so they're girdling the tree.
They're killing all the tree,
basically a ring around the tree,
that's cutting off that flow.
A two-lined chestnut borer is one of those kind of insects.
This is the kind of galleries it creates in the picture.
It's a good looking worm, it's got different segments,
kind of rounded on both ends.
When I talk about the emerald ash borer,
it's gonna look a little bit different than this one.
That's why I want to start with this picture, so you can get a look at it
because you might see damage that's similar to an emerald ash borer,
or you might think it's an emerald ash borer.
You might think it's oak wilt,
especially for the two-lined chestnut borer.
It's good to know what this bug looks like.
We'll start with the emerald ash borer.
This is typical reaction to a tree
that's under attack from the emerald ash borer.
You'll get this epicormic sprouting.
We talked about that a couple weeks ago.
All the branches might die, but then you'll get new branches coming up
along the stem of the tree.
Here's what the galleries look like
in the left-hand picture.
They kind of make back-and-forth,
up-and-down the tree.
They produce this when they
drill into the tree, and exit from the tree
they produce a D-shaped hole.
The bronze birch borer also produces
a D-shaped exit hole.
If you see damage to a birch tree,
and you see those holes, you know exactly what it is,
it's called the bronze birch borer.
Here's the adult on the left.
That is a normal-sized penny.
It's actually kind of an iridescent green color.
I've got some good handouts on it,
and the DNR website has some
good identification handouts, too.
The larvae has the segments,
I think they look like bells,
like church bells is a good way to think about it.
If you think you got an elm that's infested with it,
if you pull off the bark, and you find larvae that look like this,
those are emerald ash borer.
You might not see the adult, but you might see the larvae.
Here's how widespread emerald ash borer
infestation is across the US.
It's only in part of Wisconsin.
but it will probably get into
every county in the state, unfortunately.
These are only the infestations that we know about.
There might be others that we don't within the state.
Even if your county is not listed as
having emerald ash borer, that's okay,
or it might have it, it just hasn't been found yet.
I think the only thing that's going to stop it
is the prairies to the west of us,
and the Rocky Mountains, and when there's no more elm.
That's what's gonna stop these guys
from getting everywhere in the US.
Here are the counties,
and the quarantines that are in place
for removing firewood.
I'll talk a little bit more about
the restrictions for removing firewood
in a few minutes,
but here's where the infestation is.
You notice that Oneida County,
that one lone red county in the middle of the state.
Rhinelander is in Oneida County,
I swear it wasn't me that brought emerald ash borer into Oneida county,
I swear.
You'll see oak wilt is up there, too.
It wasn't me.
If you think you have it,
the first thing to do is to call someone,
and see if they can confirm that you do have it.
I encourage you to go to the DNR website,
and type in "Forestry Assistance Locator,"
and then you can pick the county that your land is located in.
When you choose that you'll get the contact information for
the DNR foresters that work there.
They want to know if you do have it, and even if you don't,
if they find out you don't have it, that's great.
Then they can say either way, so there's no uncertainty.
Give them a call.
The emerald ash borer website in Wisconsin
has a lot of great information as well,
including identification,
and similar bugs that are out there,
and damage that is out there that it could be.
If you're unsure, if you want to do the investigation yourself
that's a good place to go.
You can also report it via telephone,
or at DATCP, Department of Agriculture,
Trade and Consumer Protection,
EmeraldAshBorer@wi.gov.
You can send them an email, too, if you think you have it.
Bark beetles are another girdling insect.
Their galleries, the picture on the right,
are a little bit different than the emerald ash borer.
They're very distinctive.
You can see the adult lays eggs
in those big galleries,
and then the eggs hatch,
and make the smaller galleries as they mature,
or the larvae mature.
It creates a pocket of damage
that slowly spreads.
It usually starts from lightning struck trees,
any kind of stressed trees.
In fact, bark beetles are a unique bug
in that they're attracted to trees that are stressed.
When trees are stressed they release
a hormone that tends to attract some insects.
Bark beetles are one of those insects
that are attracted to trees that are stressed.
If you can keep the trees from getting stressed,
you'll be less likely to get a bark beetle infestation,
especially, if you have pine on your property.
Here's the prevention.
Thin your trees, so that they have room to grow,
and don't become stressed because they're too crowded.
If you can, do the thinning between November and April,
so that you don't create wounds.
Even a stump is basically a wounded tree.
If you cut down the tree, and you leave the stump,
it's a living organism.
The roots are still alive. It's still alive, basically.
It just doesn't have the top of its body
that's producing sugars to help the tree grow,
so it's an open wound, basically,
that's attracting bugs,
but if you thin, or cut down those trees
between November and April,
when they're dormant,
then it's less likely that you're going to
attract those insects
because it's a dormant tree.
When you do harvest the trees, get them off your property as soon as you can
because those logs are still alive
for a long time after they've been cut.
It's an open wound that's gonna attract bugs.
Get them off your property quickly,
and then you have less chance
of getting the bark beetles on your property.
Promote diversity as much as you can.
If you have 40 acres of red pine that
your grandpa planted, or someone planted in your family,
or you're planting,
try to mix in some other species.
I'm gonna mention "promote diversity"
a number of times through the presentation.
I can't say it enough.
That's really an important part of keeping a forest healthy,
and keeping the bug,
and insect populations to a minimum.
If you do have an infestation, harvest those trees,
get them off your property as soon as you can.
Let's move on to those insects
that eat the leaves of our trees,
called defoliating insects.
Gypsy moth is one of those that's a big problem.
Here's a nice picture of a tree
that isn't looking too good with a few gypsy moths eating
the scraps of what's left of the leaves.
Often they'll eat all the leaves of trees.
Many of the species,
they have a lot of species that they prefer to feed on.
Here are the different stages of their life cycle on the right.
The male and female are different colored moths.
They lay egg masses, kind of a tan color.
The larvae are very distinctive.
They have pairs of red dots on the bottom part,
and pairs of blue dots towards the top.
They have a kind of wooly look to them.
They actually spread.
The larvae spread and have a really
unique way that they can go from one tree to another.
They put out some thread or silk.
They get to the top of the tree, they put out their silk,
and that silk catches the wind,
and carries them from one tree to another,
up to like 100 feet, or something.
It's pretty amazing.
Here is the quarantined counties for gypsy moth.
You can see it's slowly working its way westward.
It will probably eventually cover
the whole state with infestation.
The DNR and DATCP
are doing some spraying for gypsy moth.
They're trying to slow the spread,
and keep the populations down to a reasonable amount,
so they don't do as much damage as they possibly could.
Earlier I talked about
the quarantines for moving firewood.
Here's a graphic of that.
The idea is that you can move firewood
if you move it within areas.
If you're in an infested area you can move it within all those
counties that already have the infestation.
So you don't have to worry about
spreading the infestation farther,
but if you're going into a county,
like those white counties that don't have any infestation,
with things like gypsy moth, and emerald ash borer,
then they'd prefer, we prefer that you didn't
move firewood into there, and maybe spread an infestation.
You'll see that Oneida County is green in here,
I swear it wasn't me.
Keep that in mind if you got firewood.
A lot of people have lived in a city,
they cut down a tree in their yard,
and they want to take it up, and burn it on their property
somewhere else.
Don't do that.
The police can stop you and fine you.
They have a lot of high priorities
in their lives already, and checking to see if you're
moving firewood too far is probably not one of them,
but that can happen,
so I encourage you to keep your firewood
on your property and burn it there,
or get rid of it within the city.
As I said gypsy moth will feed on
a number of different species, a lot of species.
In fact, I was gonna put a whole list on the slide,
but there were just too many.
There's a lot of species that it feeds on,
but there's a small number that it tends to avoid,
and if you have a diversity of
these different species on your property,
you'll have some that will do well,
and help to break up your forest,
so that whole thing
isn't getting munched on by a gypsy moth.
It's a good idea to look for these in mid-May,
these bugs.
If you have a big infestation, they won't be hard to find.
Management for a gypsy moth is to thin your forest.
Get rid of those suppressed, and intermediate trees.
That just removes the food source for the gypsy moth,
and they can be sometimes unhealthy.
They might not survive an attack,
lessen food source,
so it's a balancing you have to have
when you think about, if you do have a gypsy moth,
or there's gypsy moth nearby, you might be more diligent,
or more proactive about removing some of
those suppressed, or intermediate trees,
but if it's not in the area, you don't think you're gonna get
attacked with it, then you have to decide
whether you want to leave those or not.
But it's still a good idea to keep your forest thin,
so the trees have room to grow, and promote species diversity.
I did mention that already, didn't I?
I think I did.
Look for the egg masses.
If you're harvesting trees, or if you're just out in your forest,
you can see these egg masses.
Usually they're high up in the tree, but sometimes they might be low enough
that you can see them.
Keep an eye out for these things.
If you did see that you're getting damage from
defoliating insects like the gypsy moth, don't panic.
Trees can handle a couple of years
of defoliation and still survive.
Some of them will put out new leaves right away,
but if it's a heavy infestation, you got a lot of damage,
you can ask for some spraying to be done.
Either you can ask to have it done,
or you could do it yourself
with this insecticide called BTK.
It's a hormonal insecticide,
rather than, like, a contact burning insecticide,
but it kills anything that has, like, a larvae,
any of the lepidoptera family.
- [Audience] Now if you do that yourself
does that work for the (unintelligible)
- The question is,
if you do that yourself will it work?
It's hard to do it for yourself.
Many times the spraying is done by airplanes,
and that's really the most effective way
to get the whole population,
but if it's just like a small bush
that you have that's infested,
you might be able to do it yourself,
or a small shrub, small trees.
I encourage you, if you think you have it,
is to contact your local DNR forester.
You can go the DNR website, dnr.wi.gov,
put in "Forestry Assistance Locator,"
and find your county.
They want to know if you have it.
Contact them and they can help confirm
if you do have it,
and help you get the assistance you need if you need to spray.
There's a great gypsy moth website,
gypsymoth.wi.gov,
you can get a lot more information.
Or call this number, or send an email
if you think you have it to report any issues.
Now there are some good things going on
with controlling gypsy moth beyond just spraying.
We've released, we-- There are the people in charge
have released a good agent out there.
It's a virus that attacks gypsy moth
that was brought in from where the gypsy moth are native.
When the gypsy moth look like this,
in this picture, are in a "V" formation,
or in a "V" form,
they've been killed by this particular virus.
So it does work.
There's been a lot of testing done with it.
It doesn't attack many other species,
if not any other species.
There's always that concern about if you bring something in
to kill something else that's been brought in,
and those get out of hand,
like the lady beetles that were brought in,
and now they're a huge problem.
I think we're a little better at it now, hopefully.
For this particular bug, it's important to try
to control its population the best we can.
Here's another defoliating insect,
the jack pine, or the spruce budworm.
It tends to attack jack pine species,
or spruce species.
It doesn't feed on all of the needles in the tree.
In fact, it feeds on some of them.
It's called haphazard defoliation,
so it's kind of messy.
Here's what the bug looks like eating the buds of this tree.
As it gets older, it gets a real distinct color.
It has a black head with kind of a copper-colored body,
and pairs of white dots going up its body.
It's a really neat looking bug, in a picture,
on someone else's property,
but if you have a whole bunch of them on your property,
it's probably not that neat looking.
It's a good idea, if you do see this bug coming,
to harvest your trees.
That's why I talked about rotation age.
For jack pine, it's one of those species,
if you do have it on your property,
it tends not to grow very old,
and you tend to harvest it when it
gets to be about 40 years old.
It's a good idea to start harvesting it
if you see it coming,
or if you think you might have the budworm,
is to harvest it a little bit earlier maybe,
so you can get value out of those trees,
and you don't create a big infestation of this bug.
The thing is, here's where we talk about the balance.
At that last session when I talked about
managing for wildlife,
I said plant your pine species farther apart,
so they're bushier longer
because that's great wildlife habitat.
Here, for jack pine budworm,
we say don't do that, do the opposite.
This is the balance you have to take.
You have to think about, "Well, I want more wildlife,
"but I don't want this bug "to be killing my trees.
"Is it in the area?"
Maybe this is a good time to talk
to your local forester to see if this is an issue or not,
and then there's that thing about promoting diversity.
Did I mention that already?
I might have mentioned that already.
Promote diversity.
All right, let's move onto those root diseases.
There's a few of them out there to be aware of.
The tree tends to lose vigor,
fewer living branches, and then eventually dies.
Some of them create, when you chop off the bark,
you'll see this white stuff underneath the bark.
That's characteristic of a certain disease.
In fact, at night, when you flash a light on it
it's like an iridescent color, it's really neat.
Well, on someone else's property,
that's the time you see that.
One of those diseases is the annosum root disease.
It tends to attack conifer trees.
The trees will start to lose vigor, lose their leaves.
The needles and branches will die,
and pretty soon you'll have
all these trees dying in a pocket.
It's in some of the counties in this state,
not all of them.
You find the fruiting body
is right below the soil line.
As you can see in the picture in the lower left,
the top is the soil line,
and they dug down about 6 inches to where that mushroom is.
That's where it tends to grow.
If your pines are dying, and you're not sure why,
you can dig down a little bit into the soil,
and see if you can find a mushroom that looks like this,
or when it's kind of, when it breaks off into what's called
the "popcorn" stage,
and it's scattered around on the forest floor,
that's another indication
if you're not sure your pines are dying,
you're not sure why, it might be this thing,
and something to keep an eye out for.
It's spread in a couple of ways.
It's usually the spores are in the air,
and they land on freshly cut
trees, or on wounds on the trees,
and they infest the tree,
and they can spread from tree to tree
by the root system.
Trees will, especially of the same species,
the root systems that are near to each other,
will graft together.
There's an advantage to that
because they create this one big root system,
and they can share all the resources then from a wide area.
The disadvantage is that disease
can spread from tree to tree really quickly
via that root system, so that's what goes on.
This is one of those diseases that takes advantage of that.
If one tree in a pine grove gets infected with annosum
it can spread pretty quickly to other trees.
That's true for something else I'll talk about later.
There's things you can do about it.
Having a little bit of diversity in your stand is a good idea.
I may have mentioned that.
If you do harvest trees in the summer,
there are some things you can treat your stumps with.
A couple of products called Sporax and Cellu-Treat.
I don't get any kickbacks from those companies
for mentioning their products.
They're good products, and they're very commonly used.
This landowner is spreading the Sporax on the stumps
of the cut trees to prevent them
from getting infected from annosum.
During certain times of the year,
the loggers will put a canister of this stuff
on the harvesting head of their equipment.
When the chainsaw goes through the tree,
it spreads this Sporax, or the Cellu-Treat,
right on the stump while it's cutting.
If you are harvesting pines in the summer,
and annosum is in the area,
you can ask that this be done,
or this kind of treatment be put onto the stumps
whiles the trees are being harvested.
A couple of more wilt diseases.
These are also root-based diseases.
The trees on the left are
American elm that are dying.
There's not many of them out in the landscape anymore
because dutch elm disease has killed a lot of them off.
It's a wilt disease... it's one of those that attacks
the roots and kills the tree that way.
Oak wilt, the picture on the right,
is another one of those.
Here's where the infestation is in Wisconsin.
You'll see that there's some in
Oneida County near Rhinelander.
I swear that wasn't me.
Eventually, I'm guessing,
it will spread throughout the state.
Even though there's areas that are in white
that haven't had an infestation yet,
or hasn't been discovered yet,
they'll probably get it everywhere in the state.
That doesn't mean that every oak tree
is gonna be infected.
It just means that it's been
discovered in most of those towns.
What happens is that the leaves will turn color
either fully to brown, or partially to brown,
and fall off the tree.
It happens usually
between June and August
is when you'll see this kind of damage.
Damage can look similar to the damage
done by a two-lined chestnut borer.
The adult picture is the upper left.
Can you can guess why they call it
two-lined chestnut borer?
The bottom left-hand corner is the larvae again.
It has those kind of round segments on the end,
and then regular segments in the middle.
It looks similar to oak wilt, but the damage takes
a bit longer to manifest itself.
If your oaks are dying to pull off the bark,
and see if you can find the galleries underneath the bark,
and this particular larvae,
but oak wilt happens really fast.
Take a look at this tree.
The branches in the upper left-hand corner.
This is three days later.
That's how fast the tree can change.
Just that fast.
The two-lined chestnut borer
will take a lot longer to kill the tree,
but oak wilt can be just that fast.
So it's a good idea to keep an eye out for this thing,
and if you do find it, to get it off your property,
so that it doesn't spread to surrounding oaks,
or surrounding other trees.
Now it can spread in two different ways.
It can spread over land via
the spores that land on
the wound of the tree.
That's we say harvest in the winter,
and prune in the winter, when the trees are dormant.
There are a particular number of insects
that are attracted to wounded trees,
or the wounds themselves,
like in the lower left-hand corner,
of the left picture,
there's some beetles that are feeding on
the sap from the wound on a tree.
Now if those beetles had just been
on a tree that had oak wilt, they'd be carrying the spores
of the disease on their body,
and they've just infested this new wound.
It's a small percentage of oaks
are infested this way, like five to 10 percent.
More often than not,
they're infected by
a transmit from one tree to another
by this underground root system that's connected,
so that's why if you see a tree that looks like it's dying,
try to identify it quickly if it's oak wilt,
and get it off your property.
You may have to harvest a few of the surrounding trees
because they've already been infested,
they're just not showing it yet.
In fact, in some areas
like a city park where the trees are very highly valued,
and they don't want to kill all their trees,
or harvest all their trees, they'll dig trenches
all the way around the trees, and cut all those root grafts,
so it doesn't spread any farther.
Can you imagine how expensive that is?
You don't need to do that on your property.
Just harvest a few trees.
You might do it a bit wider than you think,
take some trees that you wouldn't like to,
but that will stop the spread of the disease.
Best bet though is, if you're gonna do some
harvesting on your property,
do it when the trees aren't actively growing,
when they're dormant.
If you can avoid the summer, that's great.
Anything all the way through March,
the entire growing season, that's even better.
Don't move firewood off from
someone else's property onto yours.
It could be carrying a disease, or be carrying a bug
that had a disease on their bodies.
If you do have to do some harvesting,
or maybe you had some damage,
and you have to do a salvage cut or something
you could treat the stumps of the trees,
so that they don't get infected.
You only have to treat the growing part of the wood,
and that's like the outer rings.
That's why you see in this picture
they've treated this stump, and it's just the blue part
that's the actively growing part of the tree,
that's not dead yet.
Like the center of the tree is basically dead.
It's just a structural part of the tree,
but the outside of the wood
is still actively transporting sugars and water.
If you just treat that outside part,
like if you have a big stump, you don't have to paint
the whole stump with a treatment.
You can just do the growing part of the tree,
and that will prevent it
from becoming infested by oak wilt.
There's different things you can use.
There's a wound paint that you can get from,
like a nursery or a garden store.
Some people will just cover it with a paint,
like they cut off a branch,
they cover the wound with a paint,
that works pretty well too.
All right, there's some canker diseases out there.
You've seen both of these pictures already.
As I said, that one on the right,
that's got a lot of character,
but that tree won't live very long,
and that disease can spread to other trees,
so you might get more trees
that have the same kind of canker on it.
This one's called a eutypella canker,
on the right.
It takes different forms as well.
In the previous session I showed these pictures.
On the right it's called black knot.
Those kind of black, knotty looking,
hence the name, infestation on the trees.
It's a good idea to cut those off,
get them off your property, or burn those trees,
so that the infestation doesn't
spread to your other trees.
The problem with the eutypella canker
is that it won't necessarily kill the tree by itself,
but it could lead to a secondary infection.
That white fungus growth in the middle of the picture,
is that secondary infection,
and that thing is gonna kill the tree.
The eutypella canker by itself probably won't kill the tree.
It will be ugly, and it will slow the growth,
but it won't kill the tree.
The tree will last a long time with that,
but that secondary infection will kill the tree.
It might look like this, in this picture.
It might have, it's called a mossy-top conk,
because it can grow some moss on the top of it,
as you see in this picture.
That will kill the tree.
Prevent wounding by
thinning in the winter.
When you're dropping trees, try not to hit other trees,
so you create wounds in those.
Now it's easy for me to say,
only harvest trees in the winter.
Obviously, loggers have to work all year round.
It's a chance you take.
It's a better chance for your trees to get infected with
something in the growing season than it is in the winter,
but we harvest trees all the time in the summer.
We just take a chance.
Many times it's a very low chance
because those diseases aren't in the area.
We might have oak wilt in
the county that our property is located in,
but it might not be anywhere near.
If we do the harvest right,
we don't cause any secondary damage,
and we treat the stumps, we should be okay.
You can do harvesting in the summer,
but it's best to do it in the winter.
If you can do that, swing that with the logger you work with,
of if you're doing harvesting for firewood
do it when the trees are dormant.
If you're doing pruning of your trees,
do it when the trees are dormant.
That's the best way to avoid any kind of infestation.
I may have mentioned diversity before, did I?
I can't remember. I may have mentioned that.
There are some other diseases out there that infect leaves.
Many times these aren't really that bad.
They look really bad, but they're not that bad.
I'll go through one of them,
particularly, called anthracnose.
It looks like the leaves are being burnt,
like the pictures on the right.
It's not that bad.
It looks worse than it really is, actually.
It tends to be if you have a really wet spring,
you get more of this kind of damage.
It tends to be in the lower part
of the Canobie where the highest humidity is,
but it won't kill the tree.
Don't worry about it.
If it happens, it's actually very common.
If you can, promote diversity, keep your forest thinned.
Your trees will be healthy, and they'll be fine.
We do have some decay in our forests.
We need to have some decay,
otherwise, we'll have trees piled up forever,
and they never will break down.
There has be some fungus in our forests to some degree.
If we have a lot of it, if every tree we have has some kind
of mushroom growing out of the side of it,
like in these pictures, that's bad,
but a few trees is good.
We need that stuff.
We need the dying trees to attract some insects and birds
that are eating them, so that we can keep these
populations down and in control.
It's okay to have some decay on your property.
It's not gonna hurt.
There's always gonna be some decay
whether it's on the ground, or a standing tree,
so it's okay to have it.
I wouldn't worry about it too much.
We want some of it.
Like I said, it usually starts
from a wound source of some kind.
Maybe a branch breaks off,
and that's where the wound starts,
or the decay gets into the tree.
Some species are more susceptible to it than others.
If you ever had a birch tree on the ground,
you realize how fast it takes for that thing to break down
before it's just empty, hollow, and you just have the bark.
It might be a year before that thing is gone.
Whereas, an oak, or a maple branch
on the ground will last forever, it breaks down really slow.
Some trees are more susceptible, break down more quickly.
The fungus eats them up more quickly than others.
I'm starting to sound like a broken record.
You know, avoid wounds, thin in the winter,
don't let your trees get old,
but leave some on your property.
A few trees is okay.
We talked about when we're
managing for wildlife, like one tree,
standing, dead tree, or snag, is okay.
A whole forest of those is bad. Like this is a good example.
One dead tree among all these living ones,
that's pretty good.
Now, if it was the other way around,
one living tree with all dead ones, that's no good.
Have a bit of a balance.
A few dead trees is okay.
It's great for wildlife habitat, but not too many.
One to six per acre is a good rule of thumb.
All right, let's move onto some
other things beyond insects and diseases.
Weather can take many different
forms in how it kills our trees.
Some of the biggest change agents
in our state are big storms.
Big ice storms, big wind storms,
lightning, hail, all those things
can kill our trees pretty quickly, or damage them.
That creates an avenue for the diseases to get in.
Just keep an eye out for this stuff.
If a big wind storm comes through,
or a big hail storm comes through, or ice storm,
sometimes they can be localized,
sometimes they can be big events.
Keep an idea of that, write it down in your calendar,
and then check your trees to see if there's damage
because it might not be this year that you see damage,
but those trees that were hit by a heavy wind,
may have cracked, and all of sudden there's
an avenue for a disease to get in, or an insect to get in.
It might be a year, or two later on
that the trees might start dying, and as you remember,
"Oh yeah, we had that big storm two years ago.
"The trees seemed to be okay, "but they were damaged."
You just gotta keep an eye on these things,
and keep track of when they happen,
and think about if something is happening in the future,
it might be related to these events.
Hail can be an issue.
I hope none of us encounter hail
like in the top left-hand corner.
I wouldn't want to get my car be hit by that.
It can cause very small wounds in trees.
Especially thin-barked trees
can be affected heavily by hail.
Like in the right-hand picture.
It was just a small wound, but that's a point of infection
for insects or diseases.
If you do get some hail, keep an eye on it.
If there is trees that have been damaged
maybe those are the ones you harvest first,
so that they don't become
a point of infection for other things, or if they do become,
like the wind storm.
If later on, all of a sudden they're dying,
if might have been from
the hail that happened a while ago.
Wind damage can take a couple of forms.
It can knock down the tree completely,
or tip them over, or it can break them off at the top.
Neither case, neither of these pictures
would be fun to have to clean up,
to get the trees out of there.
You can get a salvage harvest done
where a logger will come in and try to get as much of
the merchantable wood out of there.
If it's a big scale thing, if it's a small scale you might
be able to do it yourself.
If you can try to clean it up as quickly as you can
because those trees are just screaming that "We're hurt!"
and are attracting things that will break them down,
or cause an infestation that you might not want.
Flooding can be an issue depending on a number of things.
If the trees are dormant,
flooding tends not to be a big issue.
It depends on how long
the trees are submerged.
If it's just a few hours it's not a big issue.
If it's a couple days it might not be an issue.
If it tends to be a week or longer,
all of a sudden you might have some damage.
Some species are more sensitive
to flooding for the soil
to be saturated with water.
What's going on is that in the soil,
there's small air spaces within it.
The roots have to have
some air spaces for them to exchange gases
because they do breathe, they respirate.
If all those air spaces are filled with water,
the roots can't breathe, so they can "hold their breath,"
for a short amount of time, but not for a very long time.
Eventually those roots will die, and the trees will die.
That's why I say it depends on
how long the flooding is.
For it to be more of a problem in
if you have a sandy soil,
the water tends to drain out pretty quickly,
and it's not as much of an issue,
but if you have a heavy soil, maybe a lot of clay or a silt,
then the water tends to hang in
the soil much longer, and it can be more damaging.
Younger, healthier trees
tend to handle flooding much better
than older, stressed trees.
What did I mention?
What are those things I mentioned?
Thin your forests, diversity,
those are important things.
Those things will work well
for protecting your forest from flooding as well.
Heavy ice and snow can be a big issue,
especially if it starts breaking off branches.
Those can be sites of infection, sometime, in the future, too,
that can cause the trees to be stressed.
If you do have trees that have broken branches
due to heavy snow or ice load, you might want to harvest them,
so that they don't become a problem in the future.
Frost can be an issue for many species.
Some of the hardwoods will
re-sprout their leaves.
You can see that in the left-hand picture.
The first sprout, or the first flush of leaves
were damaged by frost.
You can see there's
new growth coming in right underneath that
as it puts out some new leaves
to try to recover from the frost damage.
It's very common.
We have frost, late frost in Wisconsin all the time,
so trees have grown and adapted to that,
so I wouldn't worry about it too much.
For conifer trees you can get
a different kind of damage called a winter burn.
If you get a warm spell, then a cold spell,
the warm spell causes the needles to lose moisture,
and then they get really cold,
and the needles can die and burn,
so you'll get, like in the right-hand picture,
most of the needles on the inside of the tree are dead,
and you have all living needles on the outside.
It kind of looks like a poodle that was just shaved,
and you have a big puffy tail, and puffy feet,
and the rest of it's really shaved close.
That analogy might not work very well,
but that's what you're gonna see.
You're gonna see the tree has new growth on the outside of it,
and all dead needles on the inside.
Many trees are susceptible to salt from road salting.
That gets into the soil,
and the trees take it up and they die.
Pines are especially susceptible to this.
Maybe if you do have pines along a road
that is heavily salted, you might want to change them out
to something else because that salt it's gonna be
in your soil for a long time.
You need to find something
that can handle high-salinity soils.
There are many species that can do that.
On the other end of the spectrum from flooding is drought.
Droughts are very common in Wisconsin.
It stresses the trees.
If the drought it too long, the trees can die from it.
The roots tend to be more heavily affected by
drought than anything else.
The fine root hairs, or the fine hairs on the roots
that's where it absorbs most of the moisture.
If you have heavy drought, the tree tends to lose those,
and its ability to take up water from the soil
is reduced and so it kind of starves to death,
to some degree.
If it's a combination of frost, heavy frost and drought,
that can be a one-two punch for many trees.
If there's soil moisture,
if there's a lot of soil moisture,
then when the frost comes in in the winter,
it kind of protects the roots from damage,
but if all that soil moisture is gone because of a drought,
the root hairs are exposed, so when frost comes in,
it tends to kill all those roots.
So as I said, a one-two punch.
There isn't a good cycle that we can point to that says
you're going to have drought these years,
and heavy rains the next year.
It can be all over the place. You can see some.
There's not a real pattern going on here.
There are some years that have heavy,
many years in a row with heavy drought.
Like in the dust bowl years,
or there's one year that has a heavy drought,
like 1977 there was a really heavy-duty drought.
Then there's all kind of years where there's a lot of rain.
There's not a real pattern to this.
It's gonna happen.
We're gonna get both ends of the spectrum,
eventually, throughout our lifetime,
so you just need to be prepared.
If your trees are healthy, and they're growing well,
you should be fine whether
a drought comes, or if you have heavy rains.
Now we tend to do a lot of damage to our forests
either by misapplication
of chemicals,
or just by driving too much
on the roots of the trees that can kill them.
Like this case, you can see the muffler
to the truck is close to the top of this tree and killed it.
Something very simple like that can be damaging to trees.
I showed these pictures already.
Spraying herbicide on a windy day
managed to kill all these different kinds of trees.
If you're careful with the things you do,
your trees will be fine.
When you're not careful,
or if you're swinging a chainsaw around
because it's fun, you can do damage to the trees.
That was a terrible example, I apologize.
Fire is a common thing here in Wisconsin.
We have hundreds of fires every year.
I might have mentioned this in the previous class.
Some fires can be small, they can be on the ground.
Some could be big, like in this picture,
where they destroyed whole big parts of their forest.
What happens is that there are
some areas of the forest that aren't affected,
that haven't been burned, and so they're still kind of
standing and living, but they've been stressed.
You kind of see that in this picture.
Some of the trees, like on the left side,
are completely burned, but in the middle of that row
there's some trees that look like they're still green.
Like, "Oh, they did fine, they survived,"
but, in fact, they were probably really stressed by that fire,
and will eventually succumb to other things
that come in after the fire.
As I said, you can have small fires,
we respond to them.
A lot of the local fire departments work hard
in the fire season,
as do our DNR foresters and rangers.
Big fires, we do have some big fires in the state.
Here's one of those insects that come in,
and attack the stressed trees after a fire.
The red turpentine beetle,
you'll get this very characteristic
pitch from an attack.
Pitch tubes is a way for the tree
to respond to the attack of an insect.
You can think of them as spitting out.
They'll just try to flush
the insect out of the trunk of the tree
by using a lot of sap to just kind of flush it out,
or pitching it out, it's called.
These orange pitch tubes are
very common occurrence following
a red turpentine beetle attack.
There's things you can do to
protect your property from wildfires,
especially your structures.
You can see this was a big fire that took place,
but yet that house, and the surrounding buildings are fine
because they took some steps
to protect themselves from wildfire.
I got a publication over there
that talks a bit about the things you can do.
They're really simple.
You don't have a lot of trees around your house,
you don't have them packed together.
You prune up the bottom portion of the tree,
so that fire can't climb up into the trees.
You don't store your firewood right next to the house.
I have this great picture of a house
that all the walls of the house
have firewood stacked next to it,
and all I think of is
they just put all their fuel around their house,
and one match of this dried wood
is gonna destroy their whole property.
If you can store your firewood, and any other fuels you have
away from your house that's a good thing.
It's very simple things you can do
to protect your home from wildfires.
Making your driveway wide enough,
so that emergency vehicles can get in there
is also a good thing to do.
All right, let's talk a bit about other things
out there that are gonna kill your trees,
birds and mammals.
Usually they cause damage to certain parts of the tree.
Sometimes it's cosmetic.
Depending on the size of the tree, it can handle it.
If it's a small tree, it can kill it,
but for big trees it's mostly cosmetic.
Here's one that's not cosmetic.
The picture on the left is of
a plantation where they planted alternating rows
of white pine and red oak.
You can see that row in the middle of red oak
it didn't really do very well.
In fact, the circle is of a red oak tree.
Those white pine are doing great.
The red oak in the picture on the right
is one of those that was planted.
It's just getting hammered by the deer.
It puts up a new shoot every year,
and the deer eat it down to the ground.
It puts up a new shoot, deer eat it down to the ground,
and it becomes just little bushes
like the picture on the right.
They'll survive quite a long time like that,
where they're just putting out new trees,
and the deer eat them down to the ground.
If you can, try to protect them.
There's a number of things you can do to protect trees from deer damage.
A really simple thing you can do,
if you've planted trees, and you want to protect them.
When you're investing a lot in those trees
it's a good idea to take some steps
to protect them from damage,
and putting what's called a bud cap on them,
to protect them, like in the picture on the left,
is a simple and cheap thing to do.
It's basically just a piece of cardboard
that you staple over the top,
or the end of the branch.
Should I go through that again?
It's a piece of cardboard, you fold it over the top branch,
and you staple it there.
You put it on in the fall. You take it off in the spring.
It protects from the deer all winter.
It's a really simple, cheap thing to do.
You could do it.
The important bud to cover is the one on the top
because you want your trees
to get tall enough so that they get above
where the deer can browse them.
If you do that every winter, you put these bud caps on,
you take them off in the spring, the tree will continue to grow,
and get tall enough
so that the deer can't kill them completely.
You can do it on the very top one.
The very top one is the most important,
but you can do it on the side ones as well.
It's cheap and simple.
It's a lot cheaper than using a repellent,
like the ones in this graph.
I put this information up there.
Someone did a study on how
effective these different repellents are.
A mixed bag of effectiveness.
Many times repellents after it rains
you have to reapply them.
Some of them you put into the ground,
and they're taken up by the tree,
but the deer has to still bite on it
before they realize it doesn't taste well.
They're still taking a part of the tree off,
so it does a pretty good job of keeping
the deer from eating the whole tree,
but they're still gonna take a bite out of it.
- [Audience] Is that for deciduous and conifer?
- Yeah, and the question is, do the repellents work for both
deciduous and coniferous trees?
In fact, yes, they do.
Really, the best thing if you're planting a tree,
the bud caps are the best thing to do.
They're cheap and they're easy,
but if you're gonna go with a repellent,
you have to do it, like I said, if it rains
you usually have to apply them again.
If you want to learn more about
controlling deer damage go to our website,
learningstore.uwex.edu.
We have a great pub called
"Controlling Deer Damage in Wisconsin."
Really the best thing
is to exclude the deer with a fence.
It's not cheap, but that's the best way to do it.
Some people say the fence has to be at least 10 feet
because the deer will jump
right over anything shorter than that.
I've seen it on my property. I've got a five foot fence.
I left the door open one night, and came in the morning,
and the deer was in there.
I chased it out, and it jumped right over
the five foot fence.
It's not cheap but that's the best way to go.
There's other things out there
that chew on our trees, mice and voles.
In the winter, underneath the snow,
they'll feed on the growing part of the tree
right underneath the bark.
This tree was eaten, basically, like, everything was eaten
as high as the snowpack.
The voles and the mice had
a good meal on this particular tree.
What you do is you try to control their population.
There's always going to be mice and voles
out there in our fields and our forests,
so it's gonna be tough to get rid of them all,
but you can keep their populations low
by doing some simple things.
If you've got planted trees,
it's a good idea to mow around them,
or spray an herbicide around the base of them,
so that they don't have any cover,
and predators can get them pretty easily.
You can leave a few standing trees
in the middle of the fields where your trees are planted,
so that predators have a place to perch.
Some people even create a perch by putting a 4x4,
like a 10 foot tall 4x4 in the ground,
and putting a cross-piece over the top of it,
so like hawks and owls have a place to perch,
and then they can hunt those
voles and mice pretty easily.
The more exposed you can make them the better.
They're always going to be there,
but if you can keep your population low,
you'll have a better chance of reducing
the amount of damage they do.
Porcupines can be an issue.
They tend to be more of a cosmetic damage.
They don't necessarily kill the tree.
You can control their population
if they're a pest on your property,
but more often than not, they're not a big issue.
They're not a big problem.
If they're chewing on your house
like they do in my place, you can put up...
We just put up some hardware cloth
over the bottom part of the wood,
so that they wouldn't chew on it,
or you put up sheet metal, just to keep them from chewing on it.
It's not very attractive, but the chewed up wood
isn't very attractive either.
It's fun for them to walk by,
and not being able to eat anything.
Sapsuckers can be a bit of a problem.
The key for sapsuckers is,
if you find a tree that they're attacking, leave it,
because they tend to come back
to the same tree over and over again.
If you see one attacking a tree, don't cut it down,
and hope that will get rid of it.
No, they'll keep coming to
the same tree over and over again.
It's very typical damage.
They tend to feed, like in a row,
up and down or side-to-side.
Leave those trees.
The tree will probably survive for a long time.
You'll protect your other trees because you're leaving your
feeding tree for them to continue to eat on.
Rabbits are also something that tend to be a problem.
The way that their teeth are arranged,
when they chew off a branch,
it cuts like a knife at a 45 degree angle.
Whereas, deer teeth,
they tend to come together.
I think it's because they're offset,
or deer teeth come together, it's more of a ripping off,
or tearing of the branch, so you get a rougher cut.
That's how you can tell the difference,
if it's a deer or a rabbit,
especially if it's a small tree.
A rabbit is like a knife cut at a 45 degree angle,
and a deer tend to be a rougher kind of biting.
Squirrels can cause a lot of damage, too.
Red or gray squirrels.
More often than not it's red squirrels.
They can sheer the bark off
trying to get at the cones that are coming in.
They can chew the growing layer
of the growing tissue underneath the bark,
so new growth can be falling off on the ground.
It's very common.
They tend not to kill the trees, but it can be unsightly,
and it can be a point of infection.
Some people will stable,
or let their livestock
graze underneath their trees.
This can have a bit of an issue
in that the livestock can impact the soil,
especially if it's a very concentrated area.
Some of them eat the bark, or rub off the bark.
One thing to think about is that,
like a steer, or a cow, or a horse,
they're heavy animals,
and their hooves aren't that big,
so all of their weight is concentrated on that one spot,
or those four spots.
Their ability to compact soil is a lot more,
it's much more, than say,
a big piece of harvesting equipment,
whose tires are this wide,
or the tracks on their vehicle are this wide.
The pounds per square inch
are much less with those vehicles
than they are for a horse,
or a steer.
You might not think, "Well, they're just walking around,
"they're not causing that much damage,"
but in fact, they can be compacting the soil pretty heavily
especially when they're in a confined area.
Okay, here's problems we have
with improper planting of trees.
They can take a number of different forms.
If you're planting bare root seedlings,
these are the kind you might get from a nursery,
especially a DNR nursery.
The best thing to do is have the hole big enough.
Well, let me back up.
As a young forester, I did a lot of tree planting,
and the instructions that I got were,
"One to a hole, green side up."
Sure, that works great.
It's a little bit more involved than that.
The hole has to be big enough,
so the roots can hang loosely in it,
and you need to prune the roots,
so that they're not too much.
When you get it from the nursery the roots can be really long,
and the top of the tree can only be this big,
so you need to prune them down a little bit.
Then you let them hang loosely in the hole,
and you just pack them up, and they'll be fine.
If you don't plant them deep enough,
you get what's called J-rooting.
The roots will kind of go in the tree into a J-shape.
They're trying to find a way to spread out,
and if you don't the tree will die from that.
If you prune too much, like the middle picture,
they took way too much of the roots there.
The tree won't survive that way,
or if you just jam the roots into a hole,
and hope it will be fine,
they tend to wrap around each other,
and choke the life out of the tree.
A big enough hole, hanging loosely,
and pack the soil around.
Many times we plant trees that are in a container,
or in a big ball.
Those are a little bit different.
You still need a big hole, and loosen up the soil.
It's a good idea to free those roots,
so that if they're in a ball, or they're in a container,
many times the roots have kind of wrapped around,
so you might have to cut the roots,
and then can spread them out a little bit,
so they grow outwards
rather than growing inwards into the tree,
and the tree will die that way, too.
The key is to do the things I've already mentioned.
If you promote diversity,
thin your forest so the trees have room to grow,
then you should be fine.
There's gonna be some insects,
and diseases that come to your property,
it's inevitable.
They're already out there, but if you do these things,
you should be fine, and your trees will continue to grow.
They might have an infestation.
You might get a few insects and diseases,
but you can take steps.
If you monitor and keep an eye on the situation,
you should be able to control them
when you see them early, and that's the key,
finding them when they're early.
Like I said, get out there
for the invasive species out there,
to find those infestations early,
and you can take care of them when they're small
before they become big and a problem.
There is a lot of help out there.
I encourage you, if you're not sure what you have,
or what's going on.
If you think you have a sick tree,
call your local DNR forester.
You're paying for them with your taxes.
You might as well utilize their system.
Even if it's just to ask them a question.
You might be able to get them to come out to your property
if you can convince them that the problem is big enough.
You can find your local DNR forester
by going to the DNR website,
and typing in "Forestry Assistance Locator."
There is forest health specialists out there,
around the state that can help you.
I'll show you a picture of who they are in a second.
When you go to the Forest Health section of the DNR website,
you can find their contact information, too.
Now, when I talk to DNR foresters
about problems like this,
the issues that I talked about tonight,
they say, "Okay, that's great."
If it tends to be a yard tree
it's a good idea to call someone else
because they specialize more in forestry trees.
If you have a yard tree problem, it's a good idea to contact
your local extension office.
They have horticulture agents, in each county most of the time,
and they can help answer questions about crab apple,
or some cultivar of maple
that you're having a problem with.
The urban problems tend to be a bit different than many of
the forestry problems out there.
You can also pay some money to people,
either an arborist, or an urban forester,
to take a look at your trees,
but there are some people out there
that can help you for free.
I encourage you to contact them.
The forest health specialists,
here they are around the state.
You can write down their name for
the county that your property is in.
Go to the DNR website,
and go to the staff directory and type that in,
you can get all their contact information.
I think the plan is to fill
that vacant spot sometime in the future.
Right now it's being covered by people
like Paul Cigan and Mike Hillstrom
are covering those counties.
If you do have land in that yellow,
top-center part of the state,
if that's where your property is,
either Mike or Paul can answer your questions.
As I said, go to the DNR website,
under "Contact Us" there's a staff directory,
and you can type in their name,
either Hillstrom, or Cigan, or Williams.
That's how you can get their contact information.
They're happy.
They want to hear about this, too.
They're geeks about insects and diseases,
so if you got something
you're not sure about give them a call,
or send them a picture, they love that, too.
They cover a big area, and they can't get everywhere.
You can take a picture with your phone, and send it to them.
Their start of diagnose is based on that.
Get out there.
My charge is to get out there, and have fun in your forest,
and keep an eye out for stuff, too.
How about that?
I'm telling you to get out into your forest.
Isn't that great?
Keep an eye out for this kind of stuff.
Look for those signs and symptoms.
Think about the time of year
that the trees are most susceptible
when these things are out there, when you might see the damage.
Keep an eye out for them,
including the invasive plants, too,
and then get some help if you need it, right?
I'm telling you, you have to go out in your woods.
Is that a bad thing? I hope not.
All right, with that, thanks for coming, guys.
I appreciate your time here this evening,
and, hopefully, you don't get any
of the insects and diseases we talked about.
(applause)