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The Mountain Pine Beetle has come to town. In Prince George, the arrival is so large that city council is considering asking for disaster relief to deal with tree removal, replanting and issues of safety. Williams Lake is facing the same problem as are many interior communities. To combat this latest infestation, one of the strategies that is often talked about as a preventative measure is pheromone baiting. While this may seem like a good idea on the surface, baiting is the last thing you want to do as a look at the other side of the story shows.

Pheromone baits are designed to attract beetles to a given tree or location. They are used in situations where a small outbreak has occurred and the intent is to draw the beetles to a specific group of trees. Once there, the beetles infest the tree or trees, which are then felled and burned on site. This is just the opposite of what a homeowner wants do.

Unfortunately there is little that can be done to stop beetles from entering your back yard. The traditional beetle-proofing methods of thinning the stand, baiting, clearcutting, introducing diversity at the stand and landscape level are all large-scale techniques which are applied in forestry, but do not lend themselves to the few trees in your backyard.

The tell-tale signs of a beetle infestation are first apparent when you see the trunk of the tree covered with little extrusions of pitch. This phase of the attack occurs when the tree tries to kill the beetle by pitching it out or killing it with an overabundance of sap. At this stage it is possible to inoculate the tree with various insecticides to kill the beetles, but this is an expensive and time-consuming process that is only marginally successful.

© Inside British Columbia

One last-ditch effort is to attract as many insect-eating birds to your backyard as you can, especially woodpeckers. You may get lucky and the birds will kill enough larvae for the trees to survive.

Usually, you don't notice that the trees have been attacked until they turn brown. Unfortunately, when this happens, the tree is already dead. The only course left is to let it fall down, or have it cut down. This can be a risky business in the tight confines of a backyard situation, where one wrong move and the tree falls into your, or worse, your neighbour's roof. Professional help must be sought to safely cut up and fell these trees.

On the bright side, once the trees are dead, they actually are less of a fire hazard than the green tree that used to stand so prettily in your garden. This is because all those oils and turpentines have left the tree needles, and they are actually not as prone to explosive crown fires as green trees.

One they reach the gray stage, they are very low risk for naturally occurring fires, but once felled, these naturally air dried trees make good firewood, so there may be a bonus if you have several of them on your property.

These trees will eventually fall over, but it will not happen overnight. On average, once the tree loses it needles and becomes 'gray attack', you usually have several years before the tree gets weakened enough to topple. This at least gives you time to consider the options and get a plan in place to deal with the problem Either way, this local manifestation of global warming reminds us all that when the beetles arrive in country or town, we in the Chilcotin-Cariboo are all in this together.

- Dave Neads

More articles in the series, The Other Side of The Story