 This is John A, and I'm John S. We're both on the tree board of Montpelier. I had to change my t-shirt, because this was the one that I wore in today, which is a caterpillar t-shirt. Isn't that awesome? He sells them. Anyway, we're here to talk about the emerald ash war, which is a pest, an invasive pest that's now landed in this area. The first one we discovered in Montpelier. February, 2018. Yeah, so a little over a year and a half ago. And national life. Yeah. And we are now looking for it. It's going to spread. It's definitely the adults have hatched, part of the process of hatching out. So we'll find it in other places around the city. The emerald ash war is an insect that fits on a penny. It's about that long. It's bright green. There's lots of bright green insects, as you were saying. But if it doesn't fit on a penny, it's not an EAD. And this thing landed in the Detroit area in 2002, I believe. And it was detected in 2002. Probably was there earlier. Probably came in on some wooden pallets, or who knows what, from Asia. And it's a naturally occurring insect there. And it has a whole host of predators that keep it in balance. It's not out of control here. There's none of those yet. And so it's just decimated, literally tens of millions of trees in the last 16 years. From Michigan into 34 states now. And if you drive from the Midwest, you'll see it all along the highways. The trees are just dead, dead, dead. It's unbelievable how fast it's coming. The insect itself will travel about a mile or two a year. So how did it get all the way out here from Detroit? Ash is great firewood. People cut these dead trees down, throw them in the camper, drive 200 miles. And all of a sudden, you've got MLH 4 spread 200 miles instead of 2 miles. And that's how it's spread. 98% of the spread has been through transported firewood that was invested with the larva. So it's really a people problem more than it is an insect problem. But we found it here. Why don't you talk a little bit about what we found? They found it up at National Life from several of the Green Ash trees there. Interesting enough, because the state forest parts and recreation is up there at National Life. And the trees were infested in about five trees cut down there that were totally infested. We know that the adults have exited some of those trees. So we know that there is more adults flying around. And we've been sort of studying this pest on its way to Montcalier since 2013. We did go to prepare this plan to deal with the pest when it got here. And it turns out it got here five years after that plan was put into place. And now we have a management plan to deal with it. And that includes trying to slow down the spread of the pest. And we won't be able to stop this pest. It's going to kill probably 99% of the ash trees in this area as it has in other places in the country. However, you can slow down that decimation if you thought that the bug will take a lot longer to kill those trees. And the way we're planning to do that is to monitor and also to act quickly when we find infested trees. So for instance, the trees at National Life, once they were noticed to be infested, they were cut down. The first batch was chipped and then put into their wood-fired boilers. So those guys were burned up. And then the next group that we found just recently this year, they were chipped into a small size. And that basically will kill the larvae because the chips will dry out. And the larvae need a good amount of material to eat so they can mature. If you have them in firewood that's maybe 16, 18 inches long, they can continue to eat and grow it there. And then if you take that firewood and you go camping, let's say in another state, you could be transporting adults to the other state. And that's how that bugs spread is people taking firewood. There's a famous case where they detected the emerald ash for in Colorado. And they were able to identify its origin being in Missouri. So somebody from Missouri went camping and took firewood with them. And so now it's probably in 35 or 36 states east of the Mississippi. Thank you, Colorado. And obviously Colorado. So the life cycle of this thing is pretty crazy, too, in that the adult flies around starting in this area in June and lays eggs right in the trunk of the bark of a tree. And that egg then hatches and develops into various stages of larva over a year or two years. So the larva is living underneath the bark and eating its way through the cambium layer. The cambium layer is that layer that provides the fluid pathway for all of the life-sustaining fluids in a tree. So after a while, this thing ends up girdling, going all the way around the tree to the extent that it kills the tree. And then this time of year, starting in about June, the larva will begin to hatch out, well, pupate, and hatch out of the tree. And the new adults will fly out, find more trees to lay eggs in. So it's a pretty insidious and rapid life cycle that results in areas where there's high infestations literally when these things hatch out, you can see them like mosquitoes. We don't have that yet here at family, but it gets pretty thick in areas. In Vermont, about somewhere around 20% of the forest is ash of one kind or another. This is green ash, typically planted in people's yards. The biggest trees in downtown Montpelier are all green ash. Then we have white ash, which is the most common in this part of Vermont in the forest. And again, roughly 20% of Vermont's, several Vermont's forests, is green ash. So these things are everything. These are the seeds forming on there. And then we have got an extra tree. We have a question as to whether both these are black ash or not. But there are not a lot of black ash around them, but black ash is an important tree because it's so on that Native Americans, in particular, use to get the wood and making the weave in the baskets. It's the only tree that you can do that with where you pound on the log and peel it off and make strips. So if it goes, there goes the whole part of the culture. So what we're doing now, you've seen the size of the bug, and we've got traps around town to try to detect the emerald ash for adults when they exit the trees. And so you'll see next to the credit union or downtown, next to three penny, and several other places, you'll see these large green triangles. There's one out here, actually. I'll put it over that way. Green traps there. And what they are is they're triangular. They have glue on the outside. And inside is a pheromone, two pheromones actually that attract the male emerald ash for. So if they're in the area, they're attracted to the trap, they hit the glue, and we check them out and find them. Unfortunately, a lot of other insects like to hit that glue. And this trap over here in this area tends to have the highest concentration of bugs per square inch of any trap I've looked at. It's amazing how productive this area is in terms of insects. John's got to get a bit of scraping the glue off. You glue on. It's a real mess. It's messy work, I'll tell you that. I have to wear gloves because that stuff is messy. So anyway, the idea is that we will, as the adults are spreading, we'll identify which areas, if they only fly two miles at most a year, and assuming nobody transports firewood in Montpelier, we'll be able to find where they are, and then really look carefully at the trees to see if they've become best. The other thing we're trying to do though, if we do detect them in any of these traps around town, we'll be broadcasting that information on the Fundsport Forum and other places, Facebook or whatever, to let people know that the bug is in your neighborhood, and it's really time to start thinking about what you're gonna do with your ash trees. Yeah, according to what we've read and the experts, if the bug is in the area, and you have trees that you wanna protect, then you would arrange for the injection of the insecticide at this time to start protecting that tree. So there are four basic insecticides that are utilized. There's only one that's recommended in Vermont, because the other three are pretty devastating other species, particularly dogs. But the one that we are now using in the downtown Montpelier trees, it has to be injected by a professional. They drill a series of holes about as big as my little finger in the base of the tree. They squirt this stuff in there, and it spreads as a systemic through the tree. When the emerald ash borer begins to eat the leaves, it kills them. When the larvae eat the cambium layer, it kills them. But it doesn't kill a lot of other insects because they don't get into the ash tree. Yeah. Is that a toxic animal? Well, it is toxic animal. Well, anyway, so I'm asking, is there a natural alternative to using it? There are none that are effective on it. We're hoping that as we slow this thing down, that two things will happen. One is other insecticides will be discovered and used. And secondly, that naturally occurring primarily wasps will be imported. They've already been imported into Canada. And you look like they're gonna be effective, but they have to have time to populate. There's also a plan to do some crossbreeding of ash trees in this country with some of the trees from Eastern Asia, so that you produce some of that resistance that those trees have in the ash trees. Y'all have a different ash tree out of it, but that's also part of the future for ash. I don't think the trees have trees either. Every two years. And how much is the cost? The cost is, if you measure the tree diameter at a point of around 54 inches, four and a half feet from the ground, you take that diameter, it's about 15 to $20 per inch of that diameter, so. What we're doing in downtown Montpelier is we're injecting these. We're planning for a 10-year injection cycle. That will give us time to grow more trees downtown. We're adding nine new trees downtown, and the ones that are not doing so well, we're replanting so that they can, we can get a 10-year growth spirit out of them. In 10 years, we can get a tree that'll be as high as a seal, if all things go well. In terms of our vulnerability in Montpelier, we've mapped out the trees along the streets that are in the right way so that that's the city's responsibility to take care of those trees, and there's about 450 of those trees that the tree board and volunteers will check annually to see if there's any signs of emerald ash board. How do we tell? And we tell the early signs, you look up in the canopy, and there's major branches in the upper canopy that are the void of leaves. That means the bug has already girdled some of those branches in the upper canopy. So it starts from the top down? It starts from the top down. See what happens is they pour their way through those little holes that were in them, and they fly up to the upper leaves there. They like sunny locations too. They go up there, they have a meal for two weeks of leaves, so they're building up their nutritional needs for mating. If you see your tree is infested and it's losing its canopy, but it still has some, that's the time to really make the decision to take it down. Another area we looked at was Hubbard Park, and if you've been in Hubbard Park, well, if you look at the state house, the background of the state house is a good portion of ash trees. And so we've alerted the state to the fact that when those trees go, you're vista on the state house and the green background that you have now will no longer be there. So they are already working on plans to deal with that. But Hubbard Park itself, just along the trails, you can see there's about 600 ash trees just along trails. And right on top of trails, within like 10 feet, there's about 170. So we have some volunteers walking Hubbard Park, taking a look at the trees, and seeing if we see any signs. Another thing that we didn't mention was the woodpeckers. And the woodpeckers are very keen on emerald ash for a larvae. They seem to be able to detect them and they take advantage of them. So one of the trees that National Life had some fairly substantial woodpeckers damage that we noticed this year, which we haven't noticed last year, and that tree was totally infested. So woodpeckers are another indicator. If you see a woodpecker coming back to a stand of ash trees on a regular basis and leaving a lot of quarter-sized holes, that's a good indication that there's something going on there that the woodpecker is keen in on. The bigger holes, if you see bigger deeper holes, generally it's not the emerald ash for these guys. They don't have to go down very far under that bark to get those. Honestly, it's hard to spot that the woodpecker damage until it's pretty advanced. The other thing that you'll see is that there'll be what we call water sprout shoots growing up, typically along the lower branches, because this tree says I'm dying and it sends out a bunch of new shoots. So if you see a bunch of tiny little whip kind of shoots coming out, that too is an indication that there may be an infestation. Yeah, those shoots are formed because the tree has lost its leaves up at the top, so it's trying to make up that photosynthetic capacity by sending up those shoots from down below and the trunk itself. Yeah, so the plan, and it's one that I would recommend no matter where you live or how big your property is, is to monitor it and slow it down because in my opinion, we figured that if we just did nothing that in 10 years time, the city would have to spend three quarters of a million dollars to take down trees that are gonna fall on people's cars or kids or houses at three quarters of a million dollars. But if we can spread that over 10 years and manage the process, it becomes something that we can accommodate. Nobody likes it, but we did talk to city council into setting aside, they said they were under $50,000 a year and ended up being only $20,000 a year starting two years ago. So we got some money in the hopper, yeah. So you're talking about if you have a wood and a sand and you want to set that shit in it, you know, if you really try to slow it down, do you just keep harvesting mature ash? Right, or if it's just in the woods and it's gonna die and you don't care, let it die. But yeah, if it's mature ash, if it's an ash tree that when it does fall is gonna hurt somebody or potentially hurt somebody, then we need to manage that. But if you're not gonna harvest it and it's not a tree to care about, then it's not gonna happen. It's gonna happen anyway. The key thing is to check out what the target is for that tree in terms of what it could hit. And if it can hit something, person, vehicle, whatever sidewalk, then that should come down. Yeah. Is there an effort to save a seed bank of ash? Well, what's happened where it's already come is that these things send out shoots after they die or after they're injured. So there'll be seeds just like with them for a long time. In fact, one of the signs of infestation is the trees tend to produce more of the seeds. Yeah. Lots of, about a hundred different insect species. We'll, if we lose them all, we'll be in trouble. They depend on air. Yeah, a hundred, it's amazing. And I don't know what they are, but you can easily find that out. That's in the literature. Yeah. That's kind of cascading things, horrifying. You know, along the river here, there's butternut still, and they're all in trouble. You know, they don't live for long, but they're still throwing nuts. But that's a good example. That and the elm are right there staring at us. Here's what's gonna happen. Yeah, so we've learned downtown to diversify our trees now, and make sure we have different species, and we've finally figured that out. But one thing I noticed about the state complex yesterday I was in Waterbury, and it seems like they planted all of them to oak trees. Like, continue series of oak trees along their road. Well, in along the road right here, right along route 12 here, are seven grignac. And so this spring, the tree board volunteered, we get a lot of support from North Branch Nature Center. They donate land back here that we have a small grocery on. So we planted seven new trees between that little green ash in the road, and you know, you figure we got some. That's the mission. So on the cards I handed out, we have a EAD mailbox. If you do have questions, you can write them into that EAD on the... Lots of good information on the state website, invasives.org, VermontVTinvasives.org. VTinvasives.org. There's a whole bunch of information about all kinds of invasives, but definitely about EAD. The Machapelia Tree Board site has references to some of those also. So if you go to our site, you'll find information on EAD and other places to get information about EAD. A question about the old tree or the observation trees. Yeah. If someone has all the bark that's been removed, though, this may be our... No, we didn't. No. Tract trees. How does that work? But how do you... Tract trees? Is that what it is? Basically what it is, it's a tree that they remove the bark and started the process of killing the tree. Right. The bug is genetically evolved to detect trees in trouble. Over in the old country, those are the trees that it could attack. It couldn't attack healthy trees. So it has something in it that can detect those odors, thermos, whatever that tree gives off and is attracted to them. That becomes a tract tree. It's a magnet for the bugs. It's not gonna last very long, but it's enough to get the bugs in there. You cut the tree down and chip it and those bugs are out of the population and it helps slow the spread. That's the plan. Another option is... Is there any tract tree setup in Lumpulia? We were going to set up one at National Life, but they found out that the tree was already infested. It was time to take it down. It was amazing. Yeah, they started clearing it off and they found the gallery. Just a second, I'll get to you. Yeah, the other option with tract trees is to actually put the insecticide in them, stress them so when the insects come, they are killed. Yeah. So this part of mentions the difference between animal dashboards and native dashboards. Is that relevant in Lumpulia? Do we have native dashboards? Yes, there are dashboards, yes. In fact, if you look up in the tops of many ash trees, you'll find dead branches. And there's a lot of other ash yellows as a common kind of group of diseases. So there's a number of things that can cause problems in ash. But this one, when it gets... So generally, like the stove head is the best way to differentiate it but we might have handled that for native and native sheds. What we're doing also as part of our monitoring processes is if we notice some trees that are distressed and have that branching problem where the leaves are gone, we'll take the bucket truck and go up there, cut the branch down and strip it to look for the galleries. So we are looking for the bug on an active basis. It's early on here in Montpelier. Soon it will be pretty obvious that the bug is everywhere, but right now it's not. And it takes several years after a bug hits a tree before you notice anything. We're just not in tune to it. So we're gonna be monitoring from the plants for the next 10 years, basically. The exit holes for the adults are about that big. Just tiny little holes. So even with binoculars, it's hopeless to see them. You gotta get up there and even stare at the darn thing. It's, you know, you gotta get your bug eyes on. Good questions. Other ones? Have you guys encountered it at all yet? No. What are some of the natural predators in this data? A lot of them are wasps. Parasitic wasps, which you guys have talked about here all afternoon. And Toronto and other parts of Canada, Ottawa have imported these and they look like they're gonna be effective. The concern, of course, is that they don't start attacking everything. Well, they're not gonna do that. But is the climate here conducive to them populating in such a way that they can make a difference? Yeah, you have to get the numbers up of the predators before they can make a dent because these emerald ash borers will produce 200 eggs per female. So you can see how few females survive and all of a sudden you've got exponential in terms of the numbers above. Interesting enough, one of the monitoring techniques that was used in the past few years we're looking at some of the wasps that are here already that are native, that create little nests near ball fields, for instance, in sandy soil. The thing I would urge you to do is to go home and really look and see what you got that is meaningful to you. And now is the time if you want to invest in the tree to do it. And I think it's a reasonable investment in terms of expense and in terms of consequences. You know, I was horrified to think that I'm the first person in my pillow's history to recommend using an emerald insecticide. But that's what I did, because we bottled by 10 years and there's no other way to do it. We could have cut these trees down. Some of the tree in front of Necky's restaurant was planted in 1976. You know, it's this big around. And... Well, I think we all know what values trees give to the community. Besides aesthetics, it's a... John had the heat gun there. You could tell how hot it was out in the street versus how hot it was underneath the tree. It was sitting on a carpet. 150 degrees in the middle of the street. And in the shade of one of these hash trees, 80 degrees. That's different. And then the stormwater runoff aspects and the pollution aspects. Just the beauty of them would be a shame to lose them, by the way. So we're hoping that by treating them for the next 10 years or so, we'll give other trees a chance to take up the slack and provide the canopy that won't happen in the future. I did also want to say that there are three other insecticides that are not recommended. Two of those can be applied by homeowners. So you can go into, you know, Walmart or something and buy this stuff, but don't do it. It's deadly. It's nasty. Yeah, it's just not something you want to do. So there are certain people in the state, arborists or tree people who are trained and qualified to install these insecticides in. It's an injection. So it's very limited exposure to people, which is the key thing. Whereas these other insecticides are ground-spread or soaked, you soak them in the ground and you know where that stuff's going to run off to. So you definitely wouldn't want to be spreading that stuff around. Would the trees tolerate a mild electric shock? Sure, like a fence, you know, like that. And so I'm going to air you five seconds. That's a good, interesting idea. That's it. And now it's the time to set that experiment up and just keep it running for the next 10 years to see if you have side-by-side accidents with one's eyes and the other one doesn't. You might kill a tree, I don't know. I don't know. That's fascinating. I don't know. That's right. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Shocks. All the stuff on the floor. That's true. Other questions? Well, thank you for coming. Thank you for coming.