Beetles to the rescue … slowly?
Southern New England used to have large green expanses of hemlock forests … until the woolly adelgid turned green to brown. An accidental release, from Japan in 1953, of this piercing/sucking insect – an endearing term used to describe any plant pest that pokes a hole in leaves and stems to access a plant's life-juices – has decimated acres and acres of woodland in Pennsylvania, New York, and many areas of New England. I've witnessed the devastation brought on by the woolly adelgid in nearby state parks. First you could see a few white, cotton-like clusters on the undersides of the hemlock branches then, a few months or a year later, the undersides of these trees were so infected that it looked like snow had settled on the undersides of the branches. Now, dead hemlock trunks stand waiting to topple like pick-up-sticks in the next heavy wind.


