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An early intervention program to guard against the dreaded spruce budworm won’t come cheap, but the cost of doing nothing would be much greater.
For thousands of years, the spruce-fir forests of our region have contended with the presence of the spruce budworm. While this native pest is always present to some level, every 30-40 years, its population explodes, causing widespread damage and mortality to our forests.
During the last severe outbreak in the 1970s and 1980s, the spruce budworm infestation caused widespread tree mortality across 7 million acres of Maine’s forest. It cost our economy hundreds of millions of dollars and the ecological effects were also significant, with adverse impacts on wildlife habitats and biodiversity. There were social impacts as well, with the resulting debate over salvage clearcuts quite literally shaping how forestry is practiced today.
To many, that infestation feels like a relic of the past, but our neighbors to the north in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick have been contending with a serious infestation since 2006. Each province implemented vastly different response protocols, giving us valuable insight into how to deal with the current influx in Maine.
Quebec was slow to react, limiting its insecticide treatments to 10% of the outbreak area each year, seeking only to slow mortality enough to allow salvage. This approach has been ineffective. Now the affected area covers 33 million acres across Quebec and Ontario. The costly spray program has grown to 2 million acres annually, but it isn’t working. Unfortunately, Quebec responded too late.
After successive defoliations, its forests have experienced extensive mortality. The result? Widespread forest fires (think back to all the low air quality days we experienced from wildfires in Quebec) and degradation of wildlife habitat and air and water quality. The economic damage will be felt for decades.
As Quebec was losing its budworm battle, New Brunswick implemented an early intervention strategy. This straightforward approach requires close monitoring of budworm populations to ensure early detection and swift intervention. After identifying “hot spots” each summer/fall, New Brunswick has responded the following spring with a highly targeted insecticide program that effectively returned budworm populations to normal endemic levels. By preventing outbreaks, it has maintained control of the budworm with minimal input and impacts.
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With an uncontrolled infestation so close to the Maine border, landowners knew it was a matter of time before conditions aligned and a large flight of budworm moths from Quebec made it into Maine. To prepare, in 2013, the state formed the Spruce Budworm Task Force. Landowners, aided by the Cooperative Forestry Research Unit’s (CRFU) Spruce Budworm Lab at the University of Maine, implemented a monitoring program.
This summer, landowners and state officials noted increased spruce-fir defoliation in areas of northern Maine. Weather radar also revealed that winds in late June directed a large budworm moth flight to our state. Going into the fall, landowners were concerned and expected the lab to document the budworm’s presence in roughly 35,000 acres of forest. Unfortunately, we were wrong. Early samples from the lab indicated that the population levels were widespread. Landowners expanded their monitoring efforts, and current indicators predict elevated “hot spot” level budworm populations in approximately 250,000 acres of Maine’s forest.
In response to this news, landowners took immediate action, pulling together to implement a coordinated response plan, in conjunction with the Maine Forest Service. We immediately got to work seeking funds to help offset the cost of implementing New Brunswick’s proven early intervention strategy in time for the small but ravenous larvae to emerge and begin feeding in May.
We requested a meeting with Sen. Collins, and she acted quickly to include funds for this effort in the disaster relief legislation currently making its way through Congress. We are hopeful that this funding will be approved by the full U.S. Senate and House, and that the state of Maine will help landowners match these funds so we can tackle spruce budworm head-on.
The early intervention program won’t be cheap, costing $15 million in 2025 alone. But failure to act will cost much more. If left untreated, the Spruce Budworm Task Force estimates that the current infestation could disrupt Maine’s forest economy to the tune of $794 million annually, with budworm taking root far beyond northern Maine.
Please join us, the Maine Budworm Response Cooperative, in thanking Sen. Collins for her swift action to protect Maine’s forests and our heritage industry. We are lucky to have her in our corner.
With advocates like Sen. Collins, the Maine delegation and Gov. Mills (and with a highly targeted early intervention strategy) we can keep Maine’s forests healthy while protecting our rural economy. Let’s learn from our neighbors to avoid history repeating.
Alex Ingraham is president of Pingree Associates, which, together with Seven Islands Land Co., manages 820,000 acres of Pingree forestland in Maine. He serves on the boards of several nonprofit and landowner organizations across the country.