Just before 9 a.m. on a recent hot Hill Country day, Robert Edmonson, a biologist with the Texas Forest Service, turned his white F-150 pickup onto the dirt road leading to the new home of Ken Judice.
Judice, who lives just northwest of New Braunfels, had called Edmonson to ask his advice: The canopies of two live oak trees in front of his home had gone completely brown, and Judice was worried that a fast-killing scourge, oak wilt, had taken hold on his property.
Trees had already died from oak wilt in a subdivision a few miles away, and the fungus, which kills trees in a matter of months, has ravaged swaths of the Hill Country.
Oak wilt suppression efforts in Texas cost at least $500,000 a year in federal and state money, according to the Forest Service, which wages a seemingly never-ending fight to keep the disease in check. At risk are property values, shade and aesthetics.
The fungus often follows development, because trees wounded by the erection of utility poles, the whirring of weed-whackers and the cuts of heavy machinery are vulnerable. The fungus spreads fast, often traveling through connected root systems, clogging up the tree's xylem until the tree, trying to foil the fungus, essentially suffocates itself.
"By the time oak wilt is detected, the castle's overrun," Edmonson said.
Judice's property had seen upheaval in the two years it took to clear land and build his home, which he and his wife and their children moved into in April. The dirt road cut through a grove of live oaks.
"Where there's people, there's wounding," Edmonson said. "And there's sap-feeding beetles (that bear the oak wilt spore) everywhere."
Judice had asked Edmonson, a specialist who travels a seven-county area to examine oak wilt centers, to look at his trees. The stakes of his visit were high.
Along with Dutch elm disease and chestnut blight, oak wilt has taken its place as a fast killer of small forests of trees in places as far away as New York, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. It can also strike parts of Texas that have no real development, such as a stretch of land near Harper, west of Fredericksburg, where natural processes, such as a lightning strike, have left trees exposed.
If Edmonson found no oak wilt, Judice could sleep with relief.
If he diagnosed oak wilt, however, it would cost at least $15,000 to inject fungicide in 35 trees and dig a trench separating the infected trees from the healthy ones. Even then, success comes no more than 75 percent of the time. Judice would have to disclose oak wilt when selling any property, and property values would plummet.
"If oak wilt becomes prevalent here, there's no way a landowner can absorb the cost," said Judice, an oil-field consultant.
Edmonson, 43, a biologist who has worked for the Forest Service for 15 years, initially spotted what appeared to be some of the telltale signs of oak wilt: leaves with a fish-bone, varicose pattern and the new construction and road that had left the trees looking worse for wear.
But a drought has gripped the Hill Country, and Judice's trees could have suffered from a lack of water, Edmonson said. Besides, the trees lacked the "pattern of mortality" that appears with oak wilt: dead trees radiating out from one point, Edmonson said.
He talked with Judice and Tim Langlinais, an anxious neighbor.
Laws requiring homeowners to disclose oak wilt when selling their property made them think twice about whether to even bring in Edmonson, Langlinais said.
The Texas Forest Service often recommends digging a trench, at least 48 inches deep, to isolate an oak wilt center. Edmonson says 3.5 million feet of trench have been cut in Texas to protect healthy trees, enough to stretch from Houston to Lubbock.
"Like a firebreak, we try to get ahead of the progression," he said. "We dig that trench line so it doesn't travel through the soil."
It's not only the Hill Country that's been ravaged by oak wilt. Parts of Austin have been fighting the disease for years.
In Travis Heights, the group Save Austin Oaks is raising money for a trench that will cost at least $44,000. The first half of the project was completed earlier this month, and Save Austin Oaks aims to finish the project by the end of May, said Robin Sanders, who is heading up the effort. After cutting several feet deep through streets and private property, contractors refill the trench with concrete and soil.
The group is racing to prevent the spread of oak wilt, which has killed trees in an area several blocks east of South Congress Avenue that's bounded by Academy Drive, Newning Avenue, Park Lane and Hillside Avenue. The perimeter of the infected areas appears to be advancing outward at 70 to 150 feet per year, and the homeowners hope to keep diseased roots from infecting healthy ones.
"If you let an outbreak get unaddressed, it gets larger and harder to contain," said Sanders, whose home with at least five live oaks sits three houses away from the outbreak. "It's an ugly death. It's not like a storm that comes by and kills a limb. It's just tragic."
About five years ago, Travis Heights residents raised $150,000 to dig a bigger trench to stave off an outbreak, Sanders said.
But in spring 2008, Nathaniel Chapin found leaves were dropping off one of the large live oaks on his property, just outside the trench. A Forest Service specialist confirmed oak wilt.
"It's lost 80 percent of its canopy," he said of the dying tree, which he estimated at more than 100 years old. He said that he and his family have already felt the lack of shade.
Realtor Elizabeth Brooks, who works in Travis Heights, says it is hard to pinpoint how much each live oak tree is worth, "but it increases the value of the property."
"Trees can transform a property that looks fairly average into a wonderful picture."
After examining the evidence near New Braunfels, Edmonson had good news for Judice and Langlinais: He was pretty sure the trees were suffering not from oak wilt, but from simple wear-and-tear and drought.
"There's been one stress after another after another (on the trees)," he said.
He suggested they wait another six months to see whether other trees suffered and whether any patterns were detectable. Should trenching be required, the Forest Service can get federal oak wilt suppression money to pay up to 40 percent of trenching costs, maxing out at $2,000 for one landowner or $10,000 for a group of landowners.
"We're gong to have to wait," Edmonson said. "We have to mark the trees and watch them through the summer."American-Statesman
