Foresters Try to Bring Back White Pines Over Michigan
12/21/99
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Title: Once, white pines towered over Michigan; now, foresters
are trying to bring them back
Source: Detroit Free Press
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: December 21, 1999
Byline: EMILIA ASKARI
If you've been shopping for a Christmas tree, you've probably had
your choice of Scotch pines, red pines, jack pines and Douglas firs.
But chances are, you didn't see any white pines.
Once, tall-growing white pines towered over much of Michigan. They so
dominated the landscape and brought such riches when they were
harvested near the last turn of the century that they were named the
state tree.
Today, white pines are rare in parts of the state. They didn't re-
seed easily in the open spaces that were left when Michigan's 300-
year-old old-growth trees were shorn for lumber a hundred years ago
and their stumps burned.
For decades since, the state's forest managers have shied away from
planting white pines because of their reputation for being
susceptible to disease and pests.
But that's slowly changing, thanks in part to the efforts of a small
team of foresters at Michigan State University, the state Department
of NNatural Resources an the U.S. Forest Service. Over the last three
years, the group has been planting experimental plots of white pine
seedlings in a handful of locations.
Their aim is to gather enough information about how the trees respond
in various soil and weather conditions to recommend the best way to
grow them.
If the tree caught hold again, it would be of more than nostalgic
interest. It would mean more homes for osprey and eagles, more tall
trees for bear cubs to practice climbing. And the straight white
pines also would be prized for lumber again. There's no local market
for it now because there isn't enough of it.
In the next 100 years, the tree's proponents say, Michigan's forests
could again be dominated by white pine. The current mixture of
hardwoods that is common in much of the Lower Peninsula could slowly
be rreplaced by a mixtur that includes white pine, which can grow for
up to 500 years and reach up to six feet in diameter. They are the
tallest-growing trees east of the Mississippi River.
The Hartwick Pines State Park, a 40-acre parcel of state-owned land
near Greyling, contains the last stand of old-growth white pines in
the Lower Peninsula. Other small pockets exist in the western UP.
The foresters say that the white pine's return throughout Michigan
would be inevitable -- if people didn't interfere. But they do.
Millions of acres of Michigan forest are managed by the government or
private owners for timber. So engineering the white pine's resurgence
requires not just waiting for nature to take its course but also
convincing forest managers to help nature along.
Some white pines are already beginning to seed naturally in the shade
of taller hardwoods. But they won't reach prominence until forest
managers give up the belief that the white pine is a finicky species
and create conditions that will help the trees grow, said Don Hennig,
a DNR timber manager for the Cadillac region.
"It had a bad reputation as a difficult tree to deal with," he
explained. "We just kind of backed off. If you were in the business
of planting trees and your expectation was that they should be here
for 50 or 100 years, you would be pretty cautious, too."
Yet as a few foresters spend more time working with white pine, their
optimism about the tree's prospects is growing like a well-fertilized
shoot.
"We're going to have some excellent stands of white pine again," Dan
Farnsworth of the state DNR said Sunday. He is the agency's timber
manager for the eastern Upper Peninsula. "You just have to have
patience. It takes time. We hope that in 100 years, these saplings
we're planting will be spectacular trees."
MSU's Deb McCullough agreed. "If you could see those big, beautiful
white pines, it would be awe-inspiring," she said.
Foresters say the trick will be getting the white pine to grow
despite the efforts of its arch enemies: a disease called white pine
rust blight and a three-quarter-inch bug called the white pine
weevil.
The weevil likes to burrow into white pine that are about five years
old and have thick leaders, or primary growth shoots. The researchers
hope that by planting white pines among older, shady hardwoods that
the pine won't grow as quickly, leaving their leaders too thin to
attract weevils.
In addition, the researchers have found that another foe -- white
pine blister rust -- is much less of a problem than it was in the
1930s, when corps of federal employees planted scores of white pine
in rows, only to see them fall to disease a couple of years later.
One theory about why the rust blister may be on the wane: during part
of its life cycle, it relies on the gooseberry bush that sometimes
grows in forest floors. Gooseberries favor sunny, new-growth forests,
such as the ones that were common in Michigan in the 1930s. Today,
our forest have more shade, fewer gooseberries and hence, less white
pine rust.
But they also have many more deer, a fact that MSU forestry professor
Dan Dickmann describes as "the wild card" in the effort to restore
white pine. "In some parts of the state," he observed, "it's very
difficult for a seedling to get going" because deer eat it. The
problem may be particularly acute in groves of aspen, where deer like
to browse and white pine seedlings thrive.
Environmentalists such as the Sierra Club's Anne Woiwode often
criticize state forest managers for harvesting aspen before they have
given white pines the shelter they need to take root and flourish.
She applauded the researchers efforts to reverse that trend.
"As a huge, super-canopy tree, white pine really should play a very
important role in our forest," she said Sunday. "It has no
substitutes. We're very eager to see white pine return."
EMILIA ASKARI can be reached at 313-222-6487 or askari@freepress.com.