Carl Schmidt tramped deep into the forest Thursday afternoon over a carpet of pine needles and wild grasses. A fawn skittered into the brush. Schmidt paused in a grove of hundred-foot-high loblolly pine trees.
"We're already in a bug spot. See how the needles there are yellowing?" he said, pointing further down the hillside to another stand of pines. "And this is just the beginning of pine beetle time. What will happen by the end of the summer, let alone next year?"
Schmidt manages the Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge, a task consumed this summer by the need to prevent the Southern pine beetle from chewing up the park's trees. The most pernicious of Southern tree-killing pests, the beetle has already ruined roughly 300 of the refuge's 35,000 acres.
But Schmidt, scientists and commercial tree farmers fear that's just the beginning. Already, 110 "bug spots" have been tallied in Piedmont. A recent aerial survey over the neighboring Oconee National Forest and adjoining counties identified dozens of other infested locales.
The drought fuels the beetles' onslaught. Forestry officials worry about a repeat of 2002 another bone-dry year when bugs caused $57.2 million in losses.
Trees are big business in Georgia. Georgia Tech estimated in 2006 that the forest industry has a $16.1 billion economic impact, sprinkled across the state from Oglethorpe to the Okefenokee. More than 67,000 jobs loggers, truckers, sawmill operators, particle-board manufacturers depend on the state's trees, primarily pine.
So too do red-cockaded woodpeckers, one of Georgia's most endangered birds, which nest in the soft wood of mature pines. The beetles target the same trees. The Piedmont and Oconee forests are prime woodpecker habitat, with pine trees filling three-quarters of their forests.
James Johnson, forest health coordinator for the Georgia Forestry Commission, flew over Putnam, Jasper and Jones counties earlier this month. He cautions that the infestation hasn't reached epidemic levels. He's less sanguine about the future, though.
"We do have a big problem," said Johnson, whose state agency abets the commercial timber industry. "Indications are that this year and next year may be pretty bad for Georgia."
Finding a home
No bigger than a grain of rice, the female Southern pine beetle burrows through bark and releases a pheromone that attracts other beetles to a tree. They attack a pine's cambium layer, between bark and wood, that carries water and nutrients through the tree. Diseased trees die within a few weeks.
Mother beetles also lay eggs inside pines. Ravenous baby bugs feed on the moist bark, tunnel out and attack other trees.
Schmidt parked his Dodge truck in the Tribble Fields deep in the refuge and pointed out the telltale signs of beetle damage: pine dust at the base of a tree from burrowed holes and "pitch tubes" at all levels where the tree's resin filled up the holes. It's easier, of course, to diagnose an unhealthy forest as the tops of trees turn from green to yellow to red, then brown.
"All these pine trees have beetles in them," Schmidt said, his arm arcing northward. "It's pretty bad; it's still spreading. Beetles are devastating this area."
Beetle plagues occur during droughts, reaching "epidemic" levels every six to 10 years in central Georgia and once every 12 years in the mountains. Lack of rain weakens trees and makes them more vulnerable. In 2002 "the worst I've ever seen," Johnson said the Forestry Commission tallied 9,070 "bug spots."
Roughly 6,500 acres of the Oconee National Forest were destroyed that year by the bugs that ravaged North Georgia, Tennessee, Florida and the Carolinas, causing a half-billion dollars in damage. About a quarter of 561-acre James H. "Sloppy" Floyd State Park near Summerville was destroyed.
Since 1972, the pine beetle has inflicted $240.2 million in damage on Georgia's trees enough wood to reach the moon eight times.
While the Southeast remains prime hunting ground, the beetles venture into New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Mexico. Forestry officials in the Alberta province of Canada have declared a beetle emergency, tallying 1.5 million diseased trees in the past year.
Johnson discovered 309 "bug spots" during an aerial survey earlier this month, most in the Oconee and Piedmont forests. He'll return to the skies this week for a more comprehensive, statewide survey.
"I don't think we'll see tremendous, catastrophic losses this year, or else we'd already be seeing damage elsewhere," said Johnson. "Federal lands, with older-growth timber, are probably a litmus test telling us conditions are getting ripe for the Southern pine beetle. We need to do something fast to stop them."
Taking out bad trees
Eight logging crews, with skidders, loaders, "cut-down" machines and tree-hauling trucks, thinned diseased trees from the Piedmont refuge Thursday. A mountain of stripped trees awaited loading in the Tribble Fields. The smell of fresh-cut pine filled the hot air.
Loggers culled the bad trees and carved out a 150-foot swath of adjoining, healthy trees to try to keep the beetles from spreading. Logging companies and mills within a 50-mile radius of Hillsboro will be busy this summer, and that's not necessarily a good thing.
A downturn in the economy, coupled with a decline in housing construction, has already hurt the timber industry. Builders aren't buying as many two-by-fours. Mills might stockpile timber instead of contracting with logging companies for more raw material. Prices have dropped.
An already glutted pulpwood market doesn't need a mess of new wood. Public, private and institutional timber owners, though, have no choice but to rid their forests of diseased timber. Drought-stressed trees, felled early, also flood the market.
Burke Walters, with F&W Forestry Services Inc. in Albany, which manages forests for landowners and investors across the South, said much of the timber industry is in recession with too much supply and not enough demand. Prices for pine sawtimber, an industry standard, have dropped 10 percent to 15 percent to $42 to $45 a ton since last fall.
Walters, though, said nobody has gone out of business yet. He also expects the market to rebound by fall unless the pine beetle goes nuts.
"If that does come to pass," he said, "you'll see a marked reduction in pulpwood prices with such a tremendous volume of wood becoming readily available to the marketplace."
The beetle hasn't reached Walters' jurisdiction south of Macon.
But timber companies are better able than the federal government to prevent outbreaks of pine beetle disease. Private growers often "farm" their trees in uniform rows of same-aged trees with little undergrowth. They harvest their trees every 30 years.
The beetles prefer older, softer, undergrowth-friendly forests attractive to the red-cockaded woodpecker.
"Most of the damage is occurring on federal lands," said Johnson. "Management activities on those lands really are catered to that species of bird which likes old-growth forest. But it's a double-edged sword [because] old trees are more susceptible to insects and the Southern pine beetle. It's a Catch-22, literally."
Lack of habitat
Schmidt passed a wild turkey, abandoned home sites and eroded cotton fields now covered in trees large and small.
He quit the truck and walked 15 minutes to a soon-to-be logged site within a quarter-mile of a woodpecker cluster.
"Unfortunately, as far as you can see in all directions, this area is dead in terms of the red-cockaded woodpecker," said Schmidt, 43.
Thirty-eight active clusters at least one bird per cluster find refuge in Piedmont, the forester said, but the beetle could destroy some of the persnickety bird's habitat. "It'd be like taking away a grocery store in your neighborhood," Schmidt said.
A 10-acre tract will be harvested here in hopes of halting the bug's spread.
"I'd like to think were going to stop it and not carve out 50- or 100-acre areas all over the place, but I can't be sure," he said. "I'm finding new bug spots faster than I can get loggers on them."Atlanta Journal-Constitution
