My mother was born in 1921 and lived in Southwestern Carbon County near the Blue Mountain. She told me as a teen, she, her sister and mom would hitch up the farm horse, walk it up to the mountain and drag home dead tree trunks for her farmhouse heating. The wood she was dragging home was American chestnut. This tree which made up about 60 percent of our forests was crucial for lumber, food for us (and Native Americans), and countless wildlife species.

Chestnut blight, introduced in New York about 1903, quickly spread throughout North America and devastated the forests. Today, with a few exceptions, only saplings with trunks about 2-inch diameters survive from the original roots, and they too die. The chestnut blight was the first of many problems our trees and forests face.

I believe I was a junior at ESSC in 1974 when the first gypsy moth defoliation hit my father’s small “patch” of land in Franklin Township. I took photos of the eerily bare trees that were completely defoliated by millions of caterpillars. I was already quite a birder and those “woods “ were quiet. There was no food for the birds to eat. White oaks were the hardest hit, but chestnut oaks and red oaks suffered much of the same fate. Since then, at least two more defoliations have occurred there and basically no white oaks and only 75% of the chestnut oaks are still alive. The gypsy moth was accidentally released in Massachusetts in 1869.

Emerald ash borer is a new forest scourge. This beetle was first discovered near Detroit in 2002 and now is found in over 24 states. Once a tree has the beetle larva under its bark, it is doomed. The grubs chew away at the vascular cambium (tree’s growth layer) and phloem (the food carrying tissue) and in about two years it succumbs. One huge white ash, nearly 100 feet tall and over 80 years old, showed signs of damage three years ago. It is now dead. Driving through Palmerton, I noticed that most of the white ash on Columbia Avenue are dead, cut down or dying. What a shame.

Our state tree, the eastern hemlock, is battling to stay alive. The hemlock woolly adelgid was first found in Virginia in the 1950s. It has spread everywhere up and down the East Coast. The nymphs and adults (looking like a tiny tip of a cotton swab) feed at the base of the needles, slowly killing them. The dieback of the trees generally begins at the largest bottom limbs and works upward. Take a walk through stands of hemlocks and you will trip over the tops of dying hemlocks that litter the forest floor.

Our most recent invasive pest is the spotted lanternfly. It was first reported in Berks County in 2014. I’m sure each one of us has seen dozens or even hundreds of them by midsummer each year. Their preferred host tree is the tree of heaven, growing throughout our area, but they feed on 172 other trees/plants. Not a fly at all, they are a type of leafhopper. If you ever tried to swat one you’ve noticed their speed. The extent of their destruction has not been fully measured, but vineyard owners and orchardists have great concerns. I have seen many on walnut and butternut trees and on some of my apple trees.

Our forests are ever changing, but birds that depend on hemlocks for shelter and nesting, or lumber companies harvesting ash or oak trees will all feel the economic impact of our involvement of moving species from native areas to new “smorgasbord” areas here in the U.S.

Test Your Outdoor Knowledge: True/False, both American eels and lamprey eels can be found in our local waters.

Last Week’s Trivia Answer: The American eel you caught in the Mahoning Creek was born in the Sargasso Sea. (Area east of Bermuda)

Contact Barry Reed at breed71@gmail.com.