Bark beetles attack famed sugar pine

Dorrington’s famed sugar pine, a behemoth once believed to be the largest in the world, may be brought to the ground by a case of bark beetles.

A tree expert will visit the pine in the coming week to assess its health, according to Dana Allen, spokeswoman for the Girl Scouts of Northern California, which owns the property where the tree stands.

“We want to do everything we can to protect our beloved tree,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Worries over the tree’s health started when a couple who spends summer in the region reported they had seen signs of the tree-destroying beetles on the pine, she said.
 

“It wouldn’t surprise me because of the current climate conditions,” said Tom Tinsley, a forester with Cal Fire in San Andreas.

California is in its third consecutive drought year, weakening trees across the state, even the giants.

Luckily, bark beetle activity appears not to have increased compared to recent years, Tinsley said, but there are still pockets of activity.

Estimates of bark beetle damage in the area vary widely, he said, but Calaveras County Supervisor Merita Callaway, whose district includes Dorrington, said the area has had “significant loss” during past droughts.

Bark beetles kill trees by boring holes through the bark, damaging the tree’s conductive vascular tissue. The tissue, kind of like a straw, draws water and nutrients up from the ground.

A healthy tree that has plenty of water and nutrients, and does not have to compete with nearby trees or contend with harsh weather, can fight off bark beetles.

The tree will literally “pitch” the beetles out, Tinsley said. The tree expels wads of aromatic sap, known as pitch tubes, which range from white to deep pink in color and resemble lumps of gum. The tubes either smother the beetles or force them out.

A tree may well appear healthy and unperturbed while really under attack.

“We have a saying: ‘The tree is dead and doesn’t know it,’ ” Tinsley said. “Once you see the pitch tubes, the tree is dead. In most cases, the tree will succumb.”

The Dorrington tree is often advertised, even today, as the largest specimen of pinus lambertiana, commonly known as sugar pine, in the world. And for a long time it was.

But in the late 1960s, its title was challenged by a sugar pine discovered not far away in a canyon near the North Fork of the Stanislaus River, said Karl Graves, a forester with the Stanislaus National Forest’s Calaveras Ranger District.

Whether it is the second largest sugar pine, a claim Wikipedia and others make, is uncertain, as such a statistic is not really tracked. But, as Graves dryly notes, “it’s still a large tree.”

At 435 inches around, according to 1994 measurements posted on the National Register of Big Trees Web site, the starting lineup of most NBA basketball teams would not be able to hug this tree. It stands 209 feet tall.

Friends of the tree near and far were shocked at its possible fate.

“Nooo! That’s awful,” said Michael Wurtz, archivist with the University of the Pacific Library, upon hearing the news. A yellowing black-and-white photo in the university’s John Muir Papers archive shows the famed author sitting under the tree in 1900.  

“Oh my gosh, that would be bad,” said Callaway, whose daughter attended Girl Scout camps held on the property. “This is part of my daughter’s memory bank.”