Wings on the River: The pines we lose

He and the black-and-white crow-sized bird with the big red crest played hide and seek for a bit, as kids and woodpeckers will do — the bird staying on the opposite side of the trunk from the human — until it finally peeked around, and the camera went “click!”

It was not a very good photo, he said.

I love these tri-colored tree-peckers. Like my dad, they love big old trees.

A study by B. Riley and Patricia T. McClelland, published in 1999, found this woodpecker loves old-growth stands of ponderosa pine, aspen, cottonwood, and larch. There’s other studies — I just enjoyed that one.

“Large trees, logs, snags, carpenter ants (Camponotus spp.), and heartwood decay are intrinsic components of healthy old growth that sustains pileated woodpeckers,” they wrote.

The ants are food. The big trees are roosts and nests. Each pair excavates a fresh nest-hole annually in the decaying heartwood of some substantial dead or living tree; a larger hollow somewhere else, with multiple exits, serves for sleeping.

Near The Dalles, where ponderosa pines predominate, there’s lots of fresh green young ponderosas sprouting on the hills. Fire suppression gives them leeway to grow thick and close, attracting infestations of pine beetle. But snags and big trees are rare.

Sometimes I worry that the pine beetles are in part responsible for that scarcity — not just because they kill trees, but because people cut down infested pines, believing the beetle inhabits them. Even when it doesn’t.

Well, that and some enterprising Euro-American folks who came along and logged off most of our old-growth Pinus ponderosa by the mid-1900s. Leaving us to restore a landscape empty of both well-managed low-intensity wildfires, and the trees that for hundreds of years grew tall and solid to withstand them.

According to the Oregon Department of Forestry, Western pine beetle (Dendroctonus brevicomis) infests the trunks of mature ponderosas, those over six inches in diameter; often trees already weakened by drought, fire, disease, or other damage.

Two generations of pine beetle emerge every year — but three to four generations are possible in warm southwestern Oregon. They feed on the phloem, the vessels which carry sugar-rich sap back down from the photosynthesizing leaves.

Signs of infestation: little blobs of pitch, emerging from tiny tubular holes in the trunk; wavering, tangling “galleries” of burrows extending out from the holes, just under the bark. Eventually, the tree will turn pale green, then yellow, then brownish-orange; then it will die.

By then, if it’s summer, it could be too late to catch the culprit. The beetles may have already hatched out, and moved to the next tree in your grove. In winter, the beetles can huddle inside after the tree’s death.

See where this is going? Chopping down your summer-dead trees may not do a lick of good. Why not leave them for the woodpeckers, unless they’re about to fall on your house (or kid, or other important stuff).

Here’s the Department of Forestry’s advice: cut trees early, that show early signs of invasion; thin your grove until pines fill just 55-70% of the space they could potentially cover; remove heavily-scorched trees after fires...

If you’re a dedicated forest manager, I’m probably not telling you anything new, but properties with just a few trees are important too. For more information, check out OSU Extension Service’s online, archived “Tree Health Webinar Series.”

Of course, wildfire is a whole other question beyond the scope of this note, a question of prescribed burns and defensible space and increasingly intense mega-fires. Old, well-spaced ponderosa pines are fire-resistant.

I don’t know enough about fire to say more than, well, good luck! Hope you don’t go up in smoke! Thin some fire-resistant ponderosas and enjoy the woodpeckers while you can.