VANCOUVER — An end is in sight to British Columbia's mountain pine beetle infestation, largely because the bugs have eaten through most of the trees that had sustained them.
Doug Routledge, vice-president of the Council of Forest Industries, said that it will take years to harvest dead trees for whatever value the wood has, but that the current phase of beetle activity is winding down.
"Beetles in the western side of the Rocky Mountains have fundamentally eaten themselves out of house and home," he said yesterday, commenting on the release of figures on the impact of the bugs.
"The beetles are running out of food, so the populations are beginning to crash," said Mr. Routledge.
A close up photo of the adult mountain pine beetle. (Dion Manastyrski/AFP/Getty Images)
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His organization represents companies in the B.C. Interior forestry sector that operate about 100 facilities in 60 communities. "It's on the downward slide now.
"Instead of being worse and worse each year now, the populations are beginning their downward cycle, which is what we expected to happen."
B.C. Forestry Minister Rich Coleman concurs.
"We can probably say the major infestation will probably be done in three to five years," Mr. Coleman said in an interview yesterday. "There's no doubt we're seeing the drop-off.
"There's no question it seems to have peaked and has flattened and is probably going down now."
The minister agrees with Mr. Routledge that the bugs are simply running out of food.
"There's always going to be bugs in the bush," said Mr. Coleman, referring to spruce budworms or others.
And pine beetles may move east into Alberta, he said. But Mr. Coleman noted that B.C.'s infestation is nearly over, leaving a challenge of harvesting dead pine and replanting.
Statistics released this month by Mr. Coleman's ministry and the forest council suggest the beetle has affected about 710 million cubic metres of timber, or about 15 years of harvest volume, during the current infestation, which dates back to 1999.
That new figure is up from 582 million cubic metres at this time last year.
That impact comes out of about 1.35 billion cubic metres of marketable pine in British Columbia. Estimates suggest 76 per cent of the total pine volume will have been killed by 2015.
But the dead, discoloured trees can still be sold for uses including burning to generate energy.
"While the actual pine beetles themselves, their populations, will have crashed, we're still going to be dealing with the salvage mode, the aftermath of this, for another decade or two," Mr. Routledge said.
He said he is satisfied with the work of industry and the provincial and federal governments on the problem.
"We've largely fallen into the right combinations of patterns to be able to do the control where control is necessary," he said.
He suggested pine beetles have been around for decades, but the current damage is so extensive because factors such as relatively warm winters allowed the insects to survive.
"We have had mountain pine beetle outbreaks that we're aware of since the turn of the century. These cycles, they happen over the centuries," he said.
"Mountain pine beetles will always be a part of the lodgepole pine forests. Normally, they're at such low levels they don't do a lot of damage. The population has got to such a huge level that they have done considerable damage. This is the beginnings of the rapid declines or the crash of the population as they run out of food.
"We'll be having to deal with the salvage phase of this epidemic for another decade or two."
