Forester David Cobb checks the status of a tiny white pine seedling that the Forest Service planted last June on a hillside above Priest Lake in north Idaho. Photo by Doug Nadvornick.
Posted: Thursday, October 15, 2009
COEUR D'ALENE, ID - A lot of small towns in Idaho date back to the 1800s, when loggers were drawn to the area by huge white pines. It’s a tree that towered over all the others and was so common that it became Idaho’s state tree. But 100 years ago, the Great Fire of 1910 burned three million acres of timber and marked the decline of the white pine. Now the US Forest Service is trying to help the tree regain its former prominence. Correspondent Doug Nadvornick went to check out young seedlings of this old tree.
Forest Service ecologist Art Zack says the white pine is the perfect tree for north Idaho.
Art Zack: “We get a lot of precipitation in the winter and spring and then we have dry summers. White pine does very well in that situation.”
Zack says, under normal circumstances, it’s also strong and virile.
Art Zack: “If there’s a fire, white pine has large cones and tall crowns and produces lots of seed. And it seeds in very well after fires. And it lives a long time.”
Even after the 1910 fire, what some consider to be the most destructive wildfire in modern American history, the prolific white pine began growing back.
Around that same time, though, Zack says a European disease called white pine blister rust made its first appearance in North America.
Art Zack: “It was done accidentally through some nursery plantings, actually in Vancouver, BC, before anybody understood the potential of this disease. And when it hit North America, it spread, well, it’s an overdone analogy, but it spread like wildfire, literally (laughs).”
Within 15 years, the tree killing disease reached the white pines of north Idaho. Zack says the disease has wiped out nine out of ten of the tree’s population.
For years, the Forest Service replanted white pines and the blister rust killed them too. Finally, the agency decided enough was enough. In the 1950s, it started to breed trees that could resist the disease.
SOUND: [sprinklers]
Sprinklers water a field at the Forest Service nursery in Coeur d’Alene. On one end of the nursery is a small white pine plantation. It’s an arborist’s version of a stud farm for horses. Nursery superintendent Joe Myers says these trees produce cones that are resistant to blister rust. They treat the cones and the seeds like gold.
Joe Myers: “Well, we’ll actually come through here with self-propelled lifts and we’ll collect them when they’re ripe, which is typically, on this site, is about the middle of August. Because most of the time, by the time the cones fall on the ground, the seed’s already been shed.”
From here, Myers and his crew process and freeze the seeds. Later, they replant them in the nursery’s greenhouses. When the seeds have sprouted to a foot or so in height, they’re ready to be transplanted into the wild.
SOUND: [footsteps]
David Cobb from the Forest Service is hiking up a remote hillside above Priest Lake, Idaho. He’s here to check on the almost 100,000 little white pine seedlings that were planted here in June. Cobb says this area, about 10 miles south of the Canadian border, burned three summers ago. That makes this an ideal site for the seedlings.
David Cobb: “And the logistics were pretty complicated because they had to transport large, fairly heavy tree boxes with our little seedlings in them, transport them about a mile-and-a-half, using carts and then putting the tree boxes on their back and hike them up a steep mountain to get to this burn area.”
This hillside is still black and white up top from the fire, but, down below, it’s beginning to turn green and red from vegetation. The only standing trees are dead, so there isn’t much competition for sunlight, and the new little seedlings can get the moisture they need.
He says the project was an expensive one, about $220,000. The Arbor Day Foundation paid for some of that.
Because of the high cost and the huge effort involved, Cobb says the Forest Service will be limited in where it can replant the white pine.
David Cobb: “We’ll never see and probably our children will never see white pine to the same degree and extent that occurred here a hundred years ago. But, with planting back these areas, hopefully we can make some gains in getting some of it back.”
Cobb says even those modest attempts to bring back the majestic white pine could lead to healthier, more resilient forests in Idaho.
Copyright 2009 Spokane Public Radio