HOME & GARDEN
Written by Larry Lindner
Photography by Kit Noble

A newly arrived beetle from the South is destroying Nantucket's pine trees.

Martha’s Vineyard has been affected too, more severely than Nantucket to this point. That island also didn’t get its first outbreak until last summer, but unlike on Nantucket, it occurred over several locations. Adam Moore, president of the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, the Vineyard’s counterpart to the NCF, estimates that around 3,000 trees have been felled so far. He counts the risk of wildfires from dead wood as the biggest threat that comes with the devastation the beetles cause. “It’s not just conservation land,” he says. “We’re in a community. People live here.”

Endangered species are at high risk as well. Nantucket has Massachusetts’ largest population of northern long-eared bats, which eat mosquitoes, moths and other kinds of insects. “They highly prefer pitch pine forests for their habitat in the summertime,” O’Dell says. “They form maternity colonies, where related females group together and raise their pups—sometimes upwards of 10 or 20 mothers roosting in pitch pine trees at a time. We have one of the last good populations of them in New England,” she says. “Losing the trees would endanger them further.”

So how do we best protect pitch pines from the invading beetles? Chop them down—or at least some of them. Southern pine beetles use the trees’ proximity to each other to grow their battalions of destruction. “What makes forests vulnerable to the beetles is if they’re too dense and don’t have good airflow,” Murphy explains. “The beetles come into a tree and, to try to overwhelm its defenses, call all of their friends through airborne chemicals called pheromones. The key to protecting forests is to thin them out and make sure there’s airflow. That disrupts the pheromones’ communication signals.”

Nantucket is on it. In 2022, with the aim to work toward preventive rather than reactive management through information sharing, O’Dell and Murphy set up a Southern Pine Beetle Working Group. It consists not just of NCF and the Land Bank but also the Town of Nantucket, Mass Audubon, the Linda Loring Nature Foundation, and several tree care and landscaping companies, including Bartlett Tree Experts, Nantucket Green Tree, KJP Land & Environment, and Champoux Landscape. Furthermore, both NCF and the Land Bank hired the Vineyard’s Moore, a licensed forester, to write stewardship plans that will guide the management of Nantucket’s forests for the next 10 years.

This past winter, the Land Bank started its first preventive efforts at Gardner Farm—conservation land close to Hummock Pond. After an intentional decrease in tree density of about 50 percent in a section just off Hummock Pond Road, the area still looks like a forest but has much better airflow so the beetle pheromones don’t concentrate as much between the pines. There are other benefits as well. “You decrease the stress that the remaining trees have,” Murphy says, “[with] more water to go around, more nutrients, more sunlight. It makes the trees as healthy as they can be to repel the beetles.” She adds, “Light can hit the forest floor now, and we can get regeneration of rare plants. We have to wait and see what comes back, but we expect it to be really nice.”

The effort to save the island’s pines will have to come not just from conservation groups intentionally monitoring for pitch pine infestation by the beetle, but from people in general. “The more eyes out there, the better,” Murphy says. “The reddening needles, that’s really what people are going to see right away—a forest of trees and one all reddened or browned out,” O’Dell says. “If you see the needles and you approach the tree and see the popcorn-shaped balls, then you know there’s a major problem.” This can happen on publicly owned land or private property and should be reported to the Southern Pine Beetle Working Group by emailing spb@nantucketconservation.org. It’s best, says O’Dell, to include a photo of the tree, directions to the spot, and, if possible, the GPS coordinates, which can be determined by dropping a pin onto a Google map.

People can also “start talking with landscaping crews about thinning the pine trees out on their own private land, making their own land more resilient,” Murphy says, “because the beetles won’t respect property boundaries. Once they get established, they can roll across many properties. This has happened on the Vineyard. Some beetles started on conservation land and ended up on private land and vice versa.” (As counterintuitive as it may seem, don’t automatically rush to cut down a pitch pine on your own property that is already dead. Dead trees no longer have southern pine beetles living in them, so if they do not have the potential to fall on people, buildings, roads, or power lines, they can be left standing to provide the preferred habitat for bats and birds.)



Can the preventive efforts keep the destructive southern pine beetles away completely? Forester Moore says, “There will still be pitch pines. They’ll just be younger pitch pines. This is what happens in the life of trees. We’d rather not have the southern pine beetle, but it’s something we’re going to have to adjust to if we’re going to manage our natural landscapes.” Adds NCF’s O’Dell, “I want to be optimistic. I don’t think every single pitch pine is going to die. But it’s hard to imagine that we’re not going to have some pretty major impacts. I’m hopeful it isn’t going to be completely devastating. Out in Ram Pasture, we were able to get on top of it really quickly. We’re hopeful that we’ve bought ourselves some time.”