At night, you can hear them moving in the trees.
They've swept through parks and golf courses and ranchland and caught thermal currents to fly on the jet stream. They've colonized an area 1,200 kilometres long and 575 kilometres wide, nearly the size of Sweden. They're about the same size as a grain of rice but can kill a tree 10 storeys high.
And perhaps scariest of all, they're stealthy. One day, a tree looks fine. The next, it's been hit by nature's version of a drive-by shooting, left with tiny drifts of sawdust at its base or looking as though it's been pelted by popcorn because “pitch tubes” – blobs of sap that are the tree's natural defence – have sprung up on its bark.
From a helicopter flying west of Williams Lake, B.C., over the majestic Chilcotin Plateau and seemingly endless waves of dead, red trees, the mountain pine beetle appears nothing less than invincible.
In fact, it's not: the beetle remains vulnerable to fire, freezing temperatures and predatory birds. It can also be killed by cutting down infested trees. But in British Columbia at least, it has proved virtually unstoppable.
“I've been here all my life, and it makes me a little bit sick to my stomach to see it,” says Lee Todd, a logging contractor and helicopter pilot who works this region, six hours by road north of Vancouver.
“Our beautiful green forest is gone. It's just gone.
“It will come back. But the question is, how do we stop this from happening again?”
Like many people in the province, Mr. Todd is grappling with the scope and implication of B.C.'s unprecedented pine beetle epidemic. Stealthier than a flood or forest fire, the infestation is laying waste to vast stretches of trees and threatens the livelihood of thousands of workers, scores of communities and some of the province's biggest companies.
So far, the financial damage has ranged from thousands of dollars paid by residents in Kamloops, Prince George and other interior cities to remove dead or dying trees from their back yards, to millions spent by forestry powerhouses to process beetle-killed wood.
But everyone in the Interior seems to know the worst lies ahead. According to industry estimates, the attack has put at risk some $43-billion worth of lumber products – or nearly six times the worth of last year's softwood lumber exports to the United States – and $10.2-billion worth of stumpage fees.
By 2013, 80 per cent of B.C.'s lodgepole pine forest is expected to be dead. (The insects prefer older lodgepole pine, a species that makes up over half the Interior's annual timber harvest and defines the very look and smell of the forests that sit between the Rockies and Coast Mountains.) And now, the crisis is reaching well beyond B.C.
In Alberta, forest officials are planning to set alight large tracts of forest this fall to kill host trees and, it's hoped, stop the beetle's eastward march. Researchers have warned that the beetle's next stop could be the northern boreal forest, with outbreaks potentially extending as far as Newfoundland and Labrador. Traditionally, the Rocky Mountains and cold winters helped have kept the beetle from heading east and tackling other species such as jack, Scots and ponderosa pine. But it's feared the kind of sustained, frigid weather required to make a significant dent in epidemic beetle populations is no longer a certainty.
If Alberta is battling the beetle, in B.C., the focus has shifted to a massive salvage operation aimed at getting beetle-killed wood out of the bush before it becomes too dry or split to turn into lumber.
In the short term, that's creating a harvesting bonanza. But it won't last. There will be a gap between the current logging rush and the time when the next generation of forests is mature enough to harvest. The loss of future timber supply presents a “very significant challenge” to affected communities and the province as a whole, B.C. says in its Mountain Pine Beetle Action Plan, noting that some communities could see their income levels plummet by 25 per cent.
