Hordes of the dreaded Southern pine beetle are killing New Jersey's forests

Bob Williams first spotted the invader in Millville, N.J., in 2001.

The certified forester was there to clear a farm field overgrown with pine trees and found a voracious army of Dendroctonus frontalis, Southern pine beetles. The discovery of so many was alarming.

"The trees were dead and the needles ready to fall off," he said. "I'd seen it in Maryland but thought the cold winters would knock [the beetles] out here."

Hordes of beetles are on the march in Cumberland, Cape May, Salem, Atlantic, Ocean, Burlington, Gloucester, and Camden Counties, and even as far north as Monmouth.

The oblong-shelled insects, about the size of a grain of rice, devoured 1,300 acres of pines in 2002. Last year, they ruined 14,000 acres. And they are expected to damage much more forestland: more than 40,000 acres this year, say experts.

They have not shown up in significant numbers in Pennsylvania, where traps have been set to detect them, state entomology and forestry officials said. In New Jersey, the story is much different.

In some pine forests, you can "look up in the canopy and see the sky," said Williams, vice president of forestry operations for Land Dimensions Engineering, a Glassboro firm that manages tens of thousands of private forested acres. "It can be heartbreaking to see 100-year-old trees dying."

Officials are monitoring the beetles' progress with traps and aerial surveys, and seeking reports from the public, said Larry Hajna, a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection.

They've also cut down trees bordering infested areas, Hajna said.

"You find the active head" of the insect invasion, "determine which way they're moving, and cut a buffer," said David Finley, a regional forester for the state. "That disorients [the beetles], and they disperse."

Pioneer beetles find trees and leave a trail of pheromones for others to follow, Finley said. Egg galleries are constructed around the trunk, then beetles and larvae feed on the cambium, the soft part under the bark, and cut the tree's resin canals. Pines take on yellowish and reddish hues before turning brown and dropping their needles.

"The extent of the tree mortality and the size of the current beetle population far surpasses anything that your state has experienced in at least a century," Matthew Ayres, professor of biological sciences at Dartmouth College, wrote in a letter to state DEP Commissioner Bob Martin.

Ayres toured New Jersey in December with other forestry experts and scientists. The damage he witnessed was "breathtaking," he wrote.

"You should act quickly: 40,000 acres of beetle mortality during the next 12 months would not be surprising," he warned Martin.

Thomas Hirshblond, a forest technician, has been cutting pines in areas such as Buena Vista Township, Atlantic County, as a break against the insects.

If the state permitted more logging, pine forests could pay for their own stewardship, he and Williams said they believed.

"It can take years to get a permit to cut down two lousy trees," Hirshblond said. Logging "regulations ran the industry out of the state."

New Jersey's aging, unmanaged forests must be thinned, he said, to withstand beetles, which were detected in smaller numbers in 1939. Healthy trees that are not crowded or affected by droughts can thwart attacking insects by drowning them in resin.

Southern pine beetles infest all pine species, but prefer pitch, shortleaf, pond, and loblolly, which grow across South Jersey. White pine is not as attractive because of its hardness and thin bark.

The insects have been found from New Jersey to Texas and from Arizona to Honduras.

In East Texas federal wilderness areas, where conditions were similar to those now in and near the Pine Barrens, a "no-control" policy led to the loss of more than 40 percent of the pine habitat in less than two years, a Texas forestry official has told the New Jersey DEP commissioner.

There is "no magic bullet," said the DEP's Hajna. "This is a complex problem."

The state will resume its trapping program by early May to determine how the beetles weathered the winter and where they are moving, he said. Data recorders left in a Cape May County forest have shown that up to 30 percent of the insects there may have been killed.

"It was colder than a typical winter, but we don't know if it was cold enough to have an impact on keeping the population down this season," Hajna said.

Williams, forest-ecology professor George Zimmerman of the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, and other experts have called on the state to choose the highest-priority forests to protect.

They also have recommended creating an advisory committee to help DEP personnel analyze the problem, developing a market for thousands of salvaged trees, and establishing research programs to study the beetle's behavior.

At the same time, Williams continues to sound the alarm in letters to state officials and in the news media.

"I know government is broke," he said, "but the time to address this problem is now."