Roger advises: Don't move firewood

Trees are becoming susceptible to many types of exotic insects and diseases coming across our borders, and our native oaks are the latest trees under attack at an alarming rate.

In San Diego County, we have an insect invading our coastal live oak, black and canyon live oak trees – it is a wood boring insect called the gold spotted borer.

This devastating wood borer originally came from Central America, worked its way up through Mexico and is also found in Arizona.

Just a few years ago, its prevalence was noted and an army of technical scientists and research departments ranging from the Forest Service and Cal Fire to universities started a massive investigation of this insect.

The gold spotted borer is an opportunistic bug and looks for trees that are slightly stressed or in a water stress mode due to the drought of the last few years. Repeated attacks can kill mature trees that are over a hundred years old.

There are over a million acres of oaks in southern California that could be threatened. In the past 10 years this insect was responsible for over 22,000 oak mortalities in San Diego County and that number is on the rise.

The insects range from the coastal zone all the way up into our local mountains and have been detected in hot spots of the Cleveland Forest and found in large oak woodland areas like Julian, Ramona and Lake Henshaw. The fear is that it could spread to many other areas.

I recently attended an all day workshop at the Santa Rosa Plateau with the best of the best in the research world presenting the latest information. There are ways that you can be part of the army of volunteers who are on the lookout for these bugs.

Research is underway as to controls, either through chemical or biological methods, and early detection is a vital component for the survival of these ancient giants.

There is an “Early Warning System” being put into place and you can help look for signs of infestation. You can check this out at http://GSOB.org for details.

I will be helping our governmental agencies in setting up a workshop right here in Fallbrook, so stay tuned for further details. In the meantime don’t move firewood out of your own backyard or go out of your local area to bring firewood home for burning. By doing this, you could be moving the bug (within the firewood) from an infected area to a new area and that could be devastating.

Trees are such an integral part of our lives; we must be good stewards by caring and taking part of their fragile eco-system.

The oak tree is registered as our national tree; let us all do what we can to protect this majestic tree for generations to come.

Roger Boddaert is a Certified Arborist by the International Society of Arboriculture with oaks as his specialty and can be reached at (760) 728-4297.