County hasn't joined beetle battle
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Chicago Sun-Times
By Gary Wisby, Environment Reporter
June 15, 2006
Officials say revenue off $40 million at midyear point
"Everybody in the Midwest" knows the only good way
to detect the emerald ash borer is to cut the bark of some ash
trees -- weakening them to attract the destructive beetle. Everybody,
it seems, except the Cook County Forest Preserve District.
One day after state officials announced the finding of the first
ash borer in Illinois -- in Kane County -- experts noted Wednesday
that Cook is the only northern Illinois county that doesn't
cooperate with a federal borer detection program.
In the Chicago area, one in five trees is an ash; it's as high
as 30 percent in some towns, said tree specialist Edith Makra
of the Morton Arboretum, who predicted a heavy visual effect
if the borer isn't stopped.
With $60,000 from the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Department
of Agriculture, forest preserve districts in Kane, Lake, DuPage,
McHenry, Will, Kendall and Winnebago counties maintain "trap"
trees to see if the green beetle has arrived.
Foresters strip bark from the ash, "girdling" them.
This sends out a chemical distress signal to ash borers, which
then attack the ash.
'I don't see the need'
About 150 trap trees were in the program last year, and "we
expect to at least double that," said Steve Knight, the
state's plant health director for USDA's Animal and Plant Health
Inspection Service.
"Everybody in the Midwest is setting up trap trees,"
said tree specialist Edith Makra of the Morton Arboretum. That
includes the other three states infested by the beetle -- Michigan,
Indiana and Ohio.
But in Cook County, forest preserve officials say trap trees
don't work. Richard Newhard, director of resource management,
said, "I don't see the need to girdle trees, which actually
kills them."
He said research done at Purdue University shows that healthy
ash trees also are infested, some of them within a few feet
of trap trees.
That's true, but "Boy, did he take that out of context,"
said Jodie Ellis, spokeswoman for Purdue's emerald ash borer
research program. "Trap trees are a blunt tool, but they're
sure a lot better than nothing."
Ash in an infested area are doomed anyway, so killing a few
to test for the bug's presence won't matter, she said.
"If you're fighting a bear and you only have a stone hatchet,
you're going to use that hatchet until someone hands you a rifle,"
Ellis said.
Ever since the first ash borer outbreak in Michigan in 2002,
Cook County has been training staff and volunteers to recognize
the beetle and the exit holes it leaves in trees, Newhard said.
Exhibits at nature centers also enlist help from the public,
he said.
Forest district faces questions
But Knight said beetle fighters are increasing their reliance
on trap trees because "we have more confidence in them
than visual surveys."
It's important to monitor Cook County because of its proximity
to Indiana and Michigan, said Makra, who organized a 28-member
ash borer planning team for Illinois in 2003. Cook is on the
Interstate 80/90 corridor linking all four infested states,
and the beetles are believed to move from state to state in
firewood transported by vacationers.
Mike Quigley, who as a County Board commissioner also sits on
the forest preserve board, said he will call for a hearing to
ask why Cook is the only county not baiting the borers with
trap trees.
"The problem of killing a few trees with testing is worth
overcoming the threat of losing thousands of trees to a new
pest," Quigley said. "But I'm willing to listen to
the forest preserve [staff] one more time."
