[NatureNS] purple finches, wooded swamps to explore while crust

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Thanks for the ref Peter.   We have a youngish beech in the garden in Halifax close to several more in the next garden, and noticed a couple of years ago that all are heavily infested, but still alive so far.   You could easily find the adults on the leaves (Chris Majka collected a few).  They don’t usually damage the entire leaf but up to about half of it will eventually turn brown, clearly depleting a significant fraction of the trees’ potential resources.  It is obviously eventually suicidal to actually kill all your hosts, so it may be that the quite recent colonization of the N. American beech is more intensive/ severe than the beetle’s effect on the original European beech species.  Maybe this is known already (?), though I didn’t see it in the reference that you cite.

By contrast, I checked an isolated young-trees beech grove in Mt Uniacke last summer while on a fly-quest nearby, and saw no sign of beetle infestation there.
Steve

On Mar 12, 2017, at 6:30 PM, pce@accesswave.ca wrote:

> Much more info here:
> 
> https://www.halifax.ca/energy-environment/environment/documents/2012Sweeney_Anderson_etalOrchestesfagi.pdf
> 
> It took our beeches several years of defoliation before they finally died. I suppose that as long as there are beeches reachable from the infected area that the beetle will continue to spread.
> 
> Peter Payzant
> 
> 
> 
> On 2017-03-12 6:19 PM, Nick Hill wrote:
>> tell us more...I only know the beech bark cancre involving a scale
>> insect and a fungus. And a legend that Queen Victoria bestowed it us.
>> Nick
>> 
>> On Sun, Mar 12, 2017 at 6:00 PM, pce <pce@accesswave.ca> wrote:
>>> Beech?
>>> 
>>> It would be nice to see them back in our forests, but an introduced insect pest, the "Beech Leaf-mining Weevil" (Orchestes fagi) has killed off all the beeches here in Waverley.  Some sort of biological control would be needed for this, presumably.
>>> 
>>> Peter Payzant
>>> 
>>>> On Mar 12, 2017, at 16:06, Nick Hill <fernhillns@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> There are things one can do. Donna has worked w getting clean genotypes of american beech that are not cancred with the beech bark disease. Now we need to make a conservation  case for beech forests and start a program like the Garry Oak on the west coast. Some say we drop the beech from consideration as a potential old growth due to the disease but increasingly I am seeing clean beech in the Valley...
> 

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