Throughout the West, an outbreak of mountain pine beetles and other native bark beetles has been turning large tracts of coniferous forests brown. These natural cycles of periodic pulses of beetle activity may be influenced by global warming because the extended periods of extreme low temperature in the spring that would ordinarily kill the beetles and halt the outbreak have not happened in recent years. Logging interests have fanned the flames of controversy surrounding the beetle outbreaks proposing massive logging projects to halt the outbreaks, even though it is well known that logging cannot stop or even slow bark beetles.

Nearly half a century ago the United States of America experienced a Beatle invasion, the likes of which it had never seen. Beatles, Beatles everywhere and yet it seemed there just weren't enough Beatles to go around. Four young Beatles crossed the great pond (the Atlantic Ocean) from Britain to the USA and Beatle mania was on. Welcomed by the music industry but despised by the older generation, these Beatles beat their drums into just about every U.S. household with a TV, radio, or record player. This "British Invasion," just four shaggy Beatles, turned this country upside down.

And, "the beat goes on." As things change, the more they remain the same. Today, the Rocky Mountains are experiencing a beetle invasion of the native kind. This time the drumbeat is to the tune of billions of native beetles passing through our western montane pine forests. A drumbeat of excuses to log our forests seems to follow beetle mania everywhere it goes.

Rocky Smith, long-time reviewer of national forests plans, policies and projects in the Rocky Mountain Region and the current director of Colorado Wild's Forest Watch Campaign, recalls, "For the most recent outbreak of mountain pine beetle, talk started picking up in about 2003 or 2004. There was an area of Grand County, Colorado that had 100% mortality in lodgepole pine by July of 2004. By then, people realized that there was going to be a large amount of mortality.

Now some people are in a panic over it. It has led to some bad laws to be proposed to Congress. Fortunately, none are likely to pass.For the spruce beetle, talk began shortly after the 1997 blowdown north of Steamboat Springs. Another event, a smaller but still sizable blow- down near Carbondale (White River National Forest) in August, 1999, ignited some talk. There was also quite a bit of beetle talk in the early 1980s, as places in the state were hit pretty hard by mountain pine beetles. The very cold winter of 1984-85 stopped those outbreaks."

In Wyoming, the western slope of the Snowy Range as well as parts of the Sierra Madres are the current site of beetle activity triggering a rash of beetle hype and plans to accelerate logging in an area where most of the sawmills had closed due to the marginal value of timber in the region.

Basic Beetle Facts
Two major groups of insects are responsible for killing stands of trees over large areas under outbreak conditions—defoliators and bark beetles. Defoliators usually exist in low numbers known as endemic populations. Bark beetle populations, by contrast, periodically grow rapidly and kill large numbers of trees over large areas. This is referred to as an outbreak or epidemic population of beetles. Thus, bark beetles are the subject of all this present mania.

A Brief Life History
The mountain pine beetle, which attacks lodgepole and whitebark pines, is currently the most widespread issue in Wyoming's coniferous forests. There are also spruce beetles and fir engravers that target other types of conifers with similar results. Throughout millennia, adult mountain pine beetles, only 1/8 to 1/3 of an inch in length, have bored through pine tree trunks and laid eggs in their inner bark. Adults die after laying eggs in the inner bark of unhealthy or drought-stressed ponderosa, lodgepole, and limber pine. Mountain pine beetle larvae later emerge and feed on inner bark layersknown as xylem where water and nutrients are transported from roots up the tree and phloem, which distributes sugars throughout the tree. When adult beetles enter the tree, they carry blue-stain fungus into the tree which, after a few months, discolors the outer wood a bluish-gray and clogs the tree's circulation of water and nutrients.

Scientists debate about what kills the tree- the beetle larvae or the fungus. Whatever the actual cause of tree death, the beetle is clearly implicated. Bark beetle larvae mature and the new adults fly to new, but not necessarily beetle-free, trees and continue the ancient cycle. As the emerging adults bore their way out through the bark to fly off, mate, and lay eggs on a new tree, their exit holes ooze thin trails of sap known as "beetle hits," the first telltale sign of beetle activity. Beetle infestations are impossible to identify until the beetles emerge and have already flown off to colonize new trees. Because foresters can't tell the infested trees from healthy ones, logging cannot succeed at targeting infected stands of trees to slow the advance of a beetle outbreak.

Discolored foliage is the telltale sign that a tree is dying. Needles on infested trees begin to fade and change color one to two years after trees are colonized by beetles. Fading colors begin in the lower crown and progress upward. Needles first turn green to yellowish green, then red and finally a rusty brown.

Up, up, and up rises the manic alarm of timber extractors who are interested in the timber harvest opportunities they see growing and at the same time, "dying" before their very eyes.

Do Sick Trees Mean an Unhealthy Forest?
Dead trees are not dead wood. Dead wood is found in petrified wood, baseball bats, furniture and treated wood. On the other hand, dead and dying trees in a forest setting become cafeterias, homes and incubators to a new generation of forest plants and wildlife, known as “nursery logs.”

Science has long established that forest food chains and energy cycles begin anew in decaying logs. Life forms ranging from essential bacteria to insects, fungi, wildflowers, grasses, woody plants and mammals depend on wood's natural decaying processes to get their start and to promote their continued survival. Birds and mammals that nest and feed in tree cavities and fallen timber, ranging from woodpeckers to chipmunks and even lynx, benefit from the habitat structure created by beetle eruptions.

Woodpecker populations may be heavily dependent on beetle outbreaks to increase their populations and maintain them over time. Birds that are ordinarily very rare can become temporarily common due to the abundant food source made available by beetles. Some view dead and dying wood associated with the present beetle mania as money in the bank. Some believe beetle infested trees are useless unless they are logged. Often, forest visitors appreciate the familiar green hues of a mountain coniferous forest and are alarmed by the unfamiliar red trees. The red assault on green-tuned eyes shocks some people into to supporting salvage logging if only to eliminate the perceived "ugly" red trees.

Why are Outbreaks So Widespread?
A healthy forest often has many unhealthy trees and even very severe beetle outbreaks are a natural, periodic feature of our western forests. Scientists suggest severe bark beetle outbreaks occur about every hundred years and that the outbreak in Wyoming and Colorado are likely the result of four interacting factors.

• Long-term drought stresses trees and makes them more vulnerable to insects. A drought-stressed tree cannot produce sufficient sap to smother invading beetle larvae.
• Unusually warm summers further stress trees and may accelerate growth of the insects, and
• Extended early springtime periods of cold, lasting at least two weeks with temperatures remaining below -20º F, are required to kill beetle larvae and halt outbreaks. These cold spring temperatures have been absent in recent years.
• Warmer than normal winters enhance survival of insect larvae.

Cold winters have historically killed mountain pine beetles to keep their populations low and halt outbreaks but several decades of rising average winter temperatures in the Southern Rockies have crossed a threshold high-temperature average. Higher average temperatures are failing to kill over-wintering mountain pine beetle larvae. This fact suggests that increased logging to control beetles is especially unwise considering the probability of long-term global warming.

Once a tree is discovered to be infested with mountain pine beetles, it is generally too late to save the tree. Signs of infestation do not appear until after the damage is already done. Beetle-killed trees can remain at least partially alive for up to five years and some trees even recover. Whatever is the eventual fate of an infested tree, it may be more likely to be targeted by beetles due to its poor health. This implies that already infested and compromised trees, in effect, take beetle infestation pressure off healthier and beetle resistent trees.

Beetles, Fire, and Logging
It is widely believed that beetle-killed forests are markedly more vulnerable to forest fires but this is largely a myth. Beetle-infested trees have an elevated fire risk only during the brief period after the needles have turned red but still remain on the tree. After the needles are dropped, a beetle-killed forest actually has a lower fire risk than a comparable healthy forest filled with green trees.

The drumbeat of beetle mania is music to the ears of opportunists seeking to turn beetle invasions into timber sales. But logging, for any stated purpose, leads to soil erosion, soil nutrient loss and a potential increase in fine fuels that increase fire risk. Further, logging mountain pine beetle- killed trees destroys wildlife habitat. Southern Rockies woodpeckers and sapsuckers such as the hairy woodpecker and Williamson's sapsucker suffer negative effects of logging followed by slash burning where dead and dying trees (the "snags" that are their homes and feeding sites) have been removed or destroyed by fire.

As more beetle activity in the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest is documented, Forest Service officials are touting salvage logging, followed by prescribed burning, as a solution for preventing further beetle spread and wildfires.

The Rocky Mountain regional Office of the Forest Service has proclaimed that salvage logging does not stop or even slow the spread of bark beetles but local Districts are holding town meetings and promoting logging projects that claim to control the same insects. For example, one of the most recently proposed timber sales in the Laramie Ranger District is the "Spruce Gulch Bark Beetle and Fuels Reduction Project."

The Forest Service's stated purpose and need of the Spruce Gulch Bark Beetle and Fuels Reduction project is to "reduce current mountain beetle populations in forested stands dominated by lodgepole pine trees, decrease the risk and hazard of catastrophic wildfire in the proximity of private lands and homes and to reduce the susceptibility of vegetation to catastrophic fire and further mountain pine beetle attacks." The Forest Service appears to be using this latest bark beetle epidemic as just another excuse to log more of the Medicine Bow-Routt.

Scientists such as Bill Romme, Tania Schoennagel and Thomas Veblen have published studies that reveal logging does not stop or even slow the spread of the mountain pine beetle and that prescribed burns do not reliably diminish the intensity of wildfires and mountain pine beetle spread. Overall, the researchers agree, environmental factors do more to influence beetle outbreaks
and wildfire intensity than whether or not an area is logged.

Fire suppression is an activity that complicates solutions to the control problem. A recent study by Oregon State University concluded that prior salvage logging followed with tree planting increased fire severity up to 61% when compared to fires on forests that had naturally recovered from previous fires. Salvage logging following pine beetle infestations, likewise, produces a potential for more intense fires. Other Colorado and Wyoming based scientists have recently collected data that supports this Oregon State University study.

It is a well established principle that logging cannot prevent or slow an outbreak of bark beetles. According to Robert Cain, a Rocky Mountain Region Forest Service entomologist, "we are not going to stop the mountain pine beetle epidemic with sanitation logging due the massive scale of infestation."

BCA has repeatedly advised Forest Service officials to allow natural regeneration of logged, burned and, more recently, beetle-damaged forest stands unless extraordinary circumstances leading to
imminent severe soil erosion and watershed damage warrant remedial measures.

Protecting Interior Forest
While beetle outbreaks actually benefit many species of native wildlife, they do reduce the amount of interior forest habitat and old-growth forest that is required by certain species that
are often rare to start with. Species expected to face a reduction in habitat as a result of beetle outbreaks include the American marten, red-backed vole, clustered lady's-slipper orchid, northern goshawk and hermit thrush. As beetles reduce mature forest habitat in affected areas, what happens to the remaining mature stands elsewhere on the forest increases in importance for these species.

When beetles move in, it is important for the Forest Service to compensate by eliminating other types of forest projects such as clearcutting and other types of logging that threaten the healthy stands of mature timber that remain. The Medicine Bow National Forest has a legal responsibility to maintain viable populations of native wildlife well-distributed across the landscape. When beetle activity reduces or degrades old growth forest and mature interior forest habitats threatening the viability of native species, the agency needs to compensate by protecting the healthy mature
stands that remain from logging, road-building and other activities that fragment the forest.

Citizens can help save the health of our public forests by writing forest officials and their local, state and federal representatives telling them to stop logging our public forests under the guise of controlling this current beetle invasion and instead protect mature forests in unaffected areas for the benefit of native wildlife.

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