By Lauren Young
Staff writer
It’s not a beetle, and it’s not a fly — it’s an invasive, aphid-like insect, and it’s destroying hemlock trees across the east coast, migrating down to Central New York and threatening the Adirondack Mountains. One team of volunteer researchers is searching throughout Onondaga, Madison, Cortland and Chenango counties looking for trees infected by this critter — the hemlock woolly adelgid, or HWA — in the middle of winter, the best time for surveying, to see if the CNY area is affected.
HWA Hunters, an initiative comprised of about 26 trained volunteers, held a review and mapping session at Cazenovia College on Tuesday, Nov. 13, planning on how to best locate infected trees and prevent hemlocks from further devastation.
This insect, found throughout the Finger Lakes and the Southern Tier, will “change the entire ecology of the Adirondacks,” said HWA Hunters Coordinator Steve Kinne.
Because no infected hemlock trees have been surveyed in Central New York, Kinne said this could be interpreted two ways — either there are no infected hemlocks trees here, or no one has been looking for them.
“Part of our job is to figure out, are we truly free of it? And, if so, where is the leading edge, or has it been here all along, but no one has been looking for it?” said Kinne.
Hemlock woolly adelgids are small, dark red-brownish bugs with white “woolly” coverings. While hard to see, they can be identified by the white woolly masses they form on the underside of branches at the base of the needles, typically found along creeks or streams. Because they can be found especially overhanging bodies of water, Kinne said it makes surveying “a little bit challenging.”
HWAs migrated from Japan in the 1950s and have no natural predators in the eastern United States. These insects suck nutrients from trees, damaging its cells and eventually causing the tree to die in less than four years. Spreading up the east coast, these bugs migrated to New York in the 1980s. The catch? These insects are only female and produce asexually — producing up to 40,000 eggs per season.
These insects spread via wind and by hitching a ride with animals, especially birds, and sometimes humans. However, HWAs are more likely to fall on humans in the summer during its crawler stage; the possibility of it hitching a ride from someone in the winter is low, so surveying for possible infestation is not likely to spread an infestation, said Kinne.
Finding infected trees
Kinne said hemlock trees, characterized by thin twigs and flat, green needles with lighter undersides, have several positive environmental impacts, like sucking up water and releasing it during periods of dryness, making flooding less severe. The difference between a healthy and HWA-infected hemlock tree lies in the base of its needles — if there are white “woolly,” cotton-like spots at the base of the needle, it is infected, said Kinne.
Over the years, Kinne, a volunteer master naturalist with the NYS Hemlock Initiative, has surveyed Stoney Pond State Forest and Tioughnioga River, and using maps indicating hemlock stands and state-owned lands, plans to send out volunteers to do the same. Locations are prioritized based on areas with no data and places that could be the “leading edge,” or where infected trees are more likely to be found.
Kinne said a lot of hemlock trees lie in Chenango, Cortland and southern Madison Counties, but the lack of data is concerning.
“Cortland and Chenango are virtually devoid of any data, so we just don’t know,” he said.
The HWA Hunters ideally would like to survey every hemlock stand at every state forest in the area but, on a practical level, that is probably not going to happen.
“Some of these are going to be hard to reach,” he said. “Sometimes you get swampy areas, but if we focus on where the biggest stands are, especially near creeks, that’s our priority, and we have a much better chance of actually picking up HWA.”
Some locations they are looking to survey include Nelson Swamp and state forests like Morrow Mountain, Mariposa, Charles E. Baker, Skinner Hill and Brookfield.
While the initiative focuses on searching state-owned lands, 75 percent of these infected areas are on privately-owned properties, said Kinne. Volunteers offering to search these private lands are especially valuable, he said, especially for Onondaga County, which lacks much state-owned land. Madison County, on the other hand, has substantially more, especially in its southern portion, and sliding down further, Cortland and Chenango Counties have a “large amount of state-owned land,” said Kinne.
The best time to survey for infected hemlock trees is January through mid-April, as the spots are the thickest and easiest to recognize then, said Kinne.
Kinne said it will take about three to four years to survey all the state lands and, by the time that is completed, it will be time to re-survey. “This is an ongoing process, so as we finish one area, three or four years later it’s time to resurvey again,” he said.
The team’s goal is to prevent the Adirondack Mountains from transforming into the Smoky Mountains, where hemlock woolly adelgids have “virtually wiped out the hemlock trees,” said Kinne.
“You see nothing but hillsides of dead hemlocks,” he said.
In groups of two or four, volunteers will write individual reports based on their surveys, and will combine the reports at the end to send to the Cornell Cooperative Extension, said Kinne.
To learn more about New York State’s Hemlock Initiative, visit Nyshemlockinitiative.info or visit its Facebook page.
If you are interested in becoming a trained volunteer with HWA Hunters, email Steve Kinne at [email protected].
