Transcripts

CATHERINE WINTER: On a cloudy morning, Becky Marty heads out to inspect the pine trees at Itasca State Park. Marty is the park's resource manager, and she's worried about the trees. She walks through Preacher's Grove, an open grove of red pines hundreds of years old. They're huge straight trunks reaching upward, like pillars of an enormous cathedral supporting a dim and distant ceiling.

BECKY MARTY: This is what people come here for. They think that this is what it used to look like. These stately old trees scattered and open. In actual, the pre-settlement records, when the surveyors initially came through, indicate that this is basically what it did look like.

CATHERINE WINTER: But every year for the past three years, windstorms have blasted through Northwest Minnesota, smashing trees to the ground. It took weeks to open roads blocked by downed trees. Throughout Itasca State Park, evidence of the storms remains. Trees are twisted over, snapped in half, sprawled on the forest floor.

BECKY MARTY: The damage in the park was insignificant compared to the total, but it was huge. We had 3,000 acres hit that we consider basically severely damaged.

CATHERINE WINTER: But the chief threat to the old growth pines was not the wind itself. The problem is trees stressed by storms are more susceptible to a parasite called the pine bark beetle. The beetles mate and nest under the bark of pine trees. Normally they're not a real problem, but too many of them will kill a tree. Marty says the pine bark beetle population in the park has exploded, and she says park officials can't afford to let nature take its course.

BECKY MARTY: If we have a summer this summer like we did last year, which was very little rain, the trees being very stressed, we have a probability of losing all the trees of the old growth pine trees within five years. That's not guaranteed, but it is a possibility. And given that possibility and the fact that the park was set aside way back in 1891, for the pines to maintain and perpetuate this type of ecosystem, it's our responsibility to do everything in our power to try to maintain that.

CATHERINE WINTER: Marty says one way to get rid of the beetles would have been to clear-cut, but that idea seemed to defeat the purpose. Pesticide wouldn't work either since it would have required completely coating every tree top to bottom. So Marty decided to try to trap the beetles. Volunteers hung traps baited with beetle pheromones throughout the most damaged areas. In theory, bark beetles will fall through a series of funnels into a cup at the bottom, where predator insects will eat them.

BECKY MARTY: So here's one of the traps. They vary from anywhere eight funnels to 16. This is a 16-funnel one. The beetles have sort of a black and white type eyesight. The idea is that the trap itself being a long funnel collection like this looks like a tree.

CATHERINE WINTER: Marty plunges her hand into the plastic cup at the bottom and comes up with a handful of insects soggy from a recent rain.

BECKY MARTY: You can see that we've collected all sorts of interesting--- ooh. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. That one's a neat one, this guy right here. This is a bark beetle predator. Bark beetles are super, super, super tiny. There's one. They look basically like a mouse turd except with rounded ends.

CATHERINE WINTER: Someone has to check the traps throughout the park every week and keep a record of what's in them. Volunteers are helping in the effort, including June and Dick Axelson.

DICK AXELSON: We found very few today.

JUNE AXELSON: Yeah. Very few. Well, most of the beetles, as I told you, seemed to still be in the trees making whoopee.

CATHERINE WINTER: The Axelsons live near the park, and June Axelson says they visit often.

JUNE AXELSON: I would hate to see a lot of these big pines come down. They're 200 to 300 years old and older. And if they start coming down, this is really going to be a loss to the park and the view. A lot of people come just to see these big pines. And it would be a big loss to Minnesota and to the country really to see any of these big ones come down.

CATHERINE WINTER: But some of the big trees are coming down. In an effort to save less damaged ones, Marty has contracted with a logger who's removing some of the trees on a few acres in the park. A machine with a huge claw picks up the giant logs and piles them on the bed of a truck.

Marty says she resisted the idea of logging at first, but she's convinced it's necessary to save other trees. She says there's no way of knowing whether the plan is working. She knows the traps are catching beetles, but she doesn't know if they're catching enough. The only way to know for sure is to check in a few years and see how many of Itasca State Park's old growth pines are still standing. I'm Catherine Winter, Main Street Radio.