Posted on 06/05/2026 6:54:22 AM PDT by metmom
America Spent $12.5 Billion Fighting the Emerald Ash Borer. The Woodpeckers Did It For Free In 2002, a beetle from eastern China arrived in a Detroit shipping crate and went on to kill more than 100 million American ash trees. The federal response cost $12.5 billion. It did not stop the beetle.
What did stop it was already in the woods. Four native bird species — and one parasitic wasp the size of a sewing needle — quietly built a predation pyramid that no quarantine, no insecticide injection, and no government program had ever designed.
This documentary follows the decade of bark-peeling, camera-trapping, and citizen-science data that revealed how the hairy woodpecker, the downy woodpecker, the red-bellied woodpecker, the white-breasted nuthatch, and a native wasp called Atanycolus cappaerti turned a continental ecological disaster into something foresters now call "lingering ash" — young trees that are starting to survive in the same counties that lost everything fifteen years ago.
Filmed in the spirit of long-form ecological storytelling. No AI narration. No clickbait. Just the slow, real work of a forest doing what biologists never asked it to do.
If you spend time on land that has been hit by the emerald ash borer — Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York, anywhere east of the Rockies — drop a comment below. Are you seeing the woodpeckers come back? Are your young ash surviving? The ground truth from the people who live there matters more than any federal report.
Hit subscribe if you want more long-form work like this. Real research. Real characters. No AI. No filler.
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Works great as long as there is no secondary consequence of the infestation. On the other hand for example, in the case of the exotic Shot Hole Borer here in California, the bugs carry a Fusarium fungus that will kill the host tree.
We’ve found the same thing.
Here in Indiana, we had the worst winter for stink bugs. I finally bought a small hand held vacuum to suck up all the stink bugs. It works great.
Back in the 80s, my brother worked for a company that took delivery from numerous countries. One time he brought home fleas from a shipment from Korea I believe. Was surprised we didn't have to professionally fumigate but I remember using bug bombs and dousing our dog with flea powder. Someone told us that as the dog moved around the house, he would drop powder in carpets, couches etc. to kill the fleas.
I had an arborist look at my eucalyptus trees - which were recommended to me by an arborist before I knew all the problems with eucalyptus.
I was terrified one of them was going to fall on my home or one of the cars - as happened to a neighbor.
He assured me the variety that I have in the yard have deeper roots and do not fall over during high winds - I certainly hope so.
Woodpeckers and wasps aren't keeping emerald ash borers under control, mature ash forests in the east and upper midwest are still dying. Perhaps a tiny sliver of ash trees that's genetically resistant (as Asian ash trees are, since they coexist with the beetle) will survive and eventually repopulate, but that will take decades if it happens at all. In the meantime, treating the trees in your yard with insecticide is the only option. If you think woodpeckers will solve the problem, you'll just have dead ash trees in your yard.
The wasp and woodpeckers havent stopped anything in Minnesota. The plague is spreading and all over the metro dead ash trees are standing or being cut down.
I had an arborist look at the trees left around my house after I had logged the property.
He was the one that told me to treat the Hemlocks with pesticide pellets.
In addition, he told me to cut a limb off a White Oak tree that was going to break. It did.
Then he said that I should put a rod between the two trunks of a Red Maple tree that came off the stump in a V. That tree broke and fell a couple weeks ago in a thunderstorm.
I cut it up. Hauled the limbs away to the dump. The logs are now laying on the firewood pile to dry for a couple years.
I have a house built in 1972. 12 acres. The work never ends.
They haven’t stopped the emerald ash borer plague in any other state either, this article is pure BS. The fact that it asserts that all is well because there are lots of little sapling ash trees is either meant to be misleading or just plain ignorance, i.e. emerald ash borers don’t go after saplings, and the saplings we have are those produced by the mature trees just before the beetles killed them.
Where did the narrator ever assert that all is well?
What I understood it to say was that it took time for the bird and wasp population to catch up as they discovered the new food source.
Nor did they claim it was happening everywhere.
We still have plenty of dead ash on our property and evidence of ash borers.
But we do have woodpeckers, nuthatches, and parasitic wasps. And hopefully, they’ll help control the infestation somewhat.
Add also the Chinese Lantern Fly.
I think similar happened with the zebra mussels
“Another gift from CHINA.”. Correction another gift from the greedy CEO’s that offshored all our manufacturing.
The zebra mussels did do the service of cleaning up the Great Lakes like nothing we could have done.
I think what happened was that they cleaned it up so well that there was nothing left for them to live on. At least, that’s what I recall. It’s been a long time since then. 40+ years since I lived in the Buffalo area.
That too!
I think what happened was that they cleaned it up so well that there was nothing left for them to live on. At least, that’s what I recall. It’s been a long time since then. 40+ years since I lived in the Buffalo area.
My understanding is following the rise of the zebra mussel arose natural predators which formerly had a lesser roles in the lakes; freshwater drum, whitefish and ducks.
>>I think Pete put that on our Victory Garden Thread? We had an Ash, but the borers got it. Beau cut it down as it might have fallen on the deck.
>>That thing will not die! It keep re-sprouting. Right now it looks like a shrub. I’m asking him to keep the tallest, straightest ‘leader’ to see if it will come back to being a tree again!
If you pile dirt around the sprouts, they may put out roots. Then you can cut the stalks and transplant them as individual trees. This works for apple tree rootstock that other more delicate varieties are then grafted onto.
That’s a great idea. I’ll see what ‘The Chairman’ wants to do about it! ;)
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