Free Republic

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...

Trees can decline for a number of reasons: insects, disease, soil compaction, winter injury, drought stress, and many other factors.

As the weather warms in May, and neighbors start taking constitutionals around the neighborhood again, we enjoy the fragrance of the flowering trees – apple, cherry, magnolia – and the spring colors of the flowering hedges – lilac, forsythia, and rhododendron. True, the flowers don’t last long… so we enjoy them while we can. As we watch, the buds grow fatter on the branches, as bursting leaves prepare to follow the spring blossoms. Once the early petals are shed, these bushes and trees will be covered with leaves, as the magic of photosynthesis takes over and enables our neighborhood greenery...

With unrelenting cold bearing down on the nation, some may dread the dead of winter. However, the cold also brings with it some surprising benefits. 1. Reduced Number of Tree-Killing Bugs Emerald Ash Borer, an invasive inspect species is known to feed on the bark of trees as larvae, ultimately cutting of the trees water and nutrient supply and resulting in the death of the tree. However, low temperatures bring hope for ash trees, as lower temperatures are known to kill more of these insects, according to U.S. Forest Service Research Biologist Robert Venette. "Around minus 20 F, we typically...