News & Bulletins

  A Call To Arms

    This is War!

        and

Here is the Enemy!

We have a problem.

The Mountain Pine Beetle has now successfully crossed the Continental Divide in force and is starting to devastate the forests along the Front Range. Forest landowners have two choices: either sit back and watch their trees die or organize and fight back. This is a war and the survival of millions of our trees and the livability of our community hangs in the balance.

A  Recent Discovery.

Recent climate information indicates that the Mountain Pine Beetle flight season (the time when the new generation of beetles fly to infest more trees) is lengthening. Normally this time can occur between early July and late September. However, it is now reported that due to climate changes, these flights can occur earlier in the Spring and later in the Fall. The significance of this means that you should remove a small patch of bark from suspected infested trees to determine the developmental stage in the beetle’s lifecycle (larva, pupa, immature or mature beetle) and plan your beetle mitigation efforts accordingly for integrated pest management.

There is a solution.

The assumption that our forests will die and, therefore, we might as well start to work on plans for the next forest generation is not an acceptable option for many of our residents. Most of our forest is still alive and a lot of us would like to keep it that way. As forest landowners, we can mobilize to do a lot more, but to win this war, or to even meaningfully mitigate the damage being done, we need each owner to step up to the plate. To those of you who are not already practicing sustainable forestry, please note: You can help make the difference.

What you can do.

•   Know the types of trees in our forest and how they are infested.

•   Learn how to properly identify the various types of beetles infesting our forest.

•   Learn how to recognize beetle infested trees.

•   Learn how the life cycle of the beetles affect the infestation epidemic.

•   Learn how and when to treat or dispose of infested trees before more are infested.

•   Be proactive. Develop a plan for Integrated Pest Management:

• Fell and remove infested and dead trees.
• Thin tree stands for forest health and wildfire control.
• Implement preventive spraying and/or alternative treatment tactics.

•   Start a new forest. Participate in the community Seedling Program.

•   Get involved.

• Join the Greenbelt Management Committee.
• Volunteer to become a Beetle Buster Team member. clbeetlebusters@gmail.com

Act now! We all need to make a commitment to act now or it will be too late to save our remaining forest. Those beetles will be flying again soon infesting more trees.