Pine beetle scourge spreads to residential areas

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It looks like Halloween came early in the Tashmoo Woods. As the rest of the Island’s trees remain staunchly green in the so-far tepid fall, pine trees that line the recreational hubs, main roads, and even backyards of homeowners in the Vineyard Haven residential area are various degrees of red and orange. 

They emanate an unmistakable “Halloweeny” feel, Bob Gilchrist, president of the Tashmoo Wood Property Owners Association, said on a recent walk around the neighborhood. But this faux change of season isn’t celebratory. The trees are dead, their decades-old lives and color sucked away from them by an insect smaller than a grain of rice — the southern pine beetle — in a matter of weeks.

The Tashmoo Woods are one of the latest to fall victim to the scourge of beetles, which on winds from the mainland, enticed by milder winters and hotter summers on the Island, have traveled over in outbreak-like numbers in the past two years and ravaged Island trees. 

Previously mostly hidden within forests, the scourge has started to spread further into residential neighborhoods across the Island, opening up new nuisances, and even safety concerns that dead trees could fall on homes or power lines.

The blight comes as multiple species of trees here are threatened in one way or another. Aside from pitch pine forests, beech trees are in jeopardy because of a nematode that slowly weakens or kills them (see page B1), and though it’s in the name of conservation and biodiversity, 175 acres of white pines are slated to be cut in the State Forest. The loss of these trees has been hard for Islanders, who pride themselves on a culture of conservation, and some have even spoken out against the State Forest project; Island musician Willy Mason held a concert to draw attention to the plan to cut thousands of white pines. 

Property owners in Tashmoo Woods, especially Gilchrist, started to see infected trees, marked by reddish-brown treetops, in April this year, though there were only a handful of them. Then in late spring and early summer, they observed a “bucketful.”

Gilchrist, who took a Times reporter around the 100-acre property, drove down to the communal dock in late September, and observed two or three new infected trees. He said those had been alive a few weeks earlier.

In four portions of the Tashmoo Woods property, they’ve identified more than 1,200 trees to be cut for safety concerns, some of which were already felled around roadways and walkways. 

The insect’s kill-spree is hard to see, but deadly. Female Southern pine beetles chew through pine tree bark, carve tunnels inside to lay eggs, and release pheromones to attract males and overwhelm the plant. The trees can’t then produce chlorophyll, which makes the tree green. Thousands of beetles can attack a tree within days. 

The S-shaped tunnels, known as galleries, starve the trees of water. Even 100-year-old trees can die in six weeks, and the beetles can move 10 feet per day in the height of summer.

To try to purge the infestation, trees produce pitch tubes of sap that resemble popcorn on the bark. Just as a human body responds to infection with a fever or cold, pitch tubes are a tree’s natural defense against predators. But the effort often fails, and the tree dies.

There’s not much that can be done to prevent infection; there’s no cure-all, but this year, the beetles attacked forests close to power lines and properties in Tashmoo Woods and other residential areas, and forced the hand of property owners.

Gilchrist reached out to forestry groups on-Island and the state Department of Conservation and Recreation months ago to understand how to treat the issue, and the board’s since initiated a plan to assess what needs to be cut and what can be replanted. They’ve followed criteria laid out by the state department that lists safety as the first priority, followed by aesthetics, then cost.

“When we started seeing these trees go, we couldn’t even catch up with how fast and how extensive it was going to be,” Gilchrist said. He added that they couldn’t complete a final plan until they knew the extent of the damage: “Otherwise, we’d be just chasing plants after plants.” They’re now at the point where they can prepare a plan.

The first phase includes common areas of the association, such as trees around the recreational pool that was forced to close three weeks early over concerns about pine needles and the filtration system. There are larger plans for the rest of the property in the future.

On private property, such as Tashmoo Woods, landowners use tree professionals and arborists to determine which infected trees are safety hazards. But in larger areas, like West Chop Woods, also in Tisbury, Adam Moore, forester and president of the conservation group Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, works on a grander scale, and submits plans to the state for approval. 

Much like Tashmoo Woods, in the past year or so, Sheriff’s Meadow has needed to cut down trees in West Chop Woods because they pose safety risks to people and homes.

Sheriff’s Meadow became aware of a scourge in West Chop Woods, a 90-acre coastal pine forest, in 2023, Moore estimated. Only a few trees were infected then, but a year later, there were quite a few more. They tried to suppress the outbreaks, and cut down a few areas of trees, but the efforts were ineffective; the beetles continued to multiply and spread across the property.

“There’s thousands and thousands of trees that are dying,” Moore said. They kill all the trees in sight, Moore said, and once attacked, tree health deteriorates rapidly.

Healthy trees near the infected trees are also often cut to stop the spread of the beetle, as thinned areas can act as a buffer from the rest of the forest. In total, 317 trees, or about 14,000 board feet, were marked to be cut along trails and property boundaries in April this year. Trees along power lines — to be cut by arborists employed by Eversource — aren’t included in this number.

On a walk through the woods, Moore told a Times reporter that he imagines the area can become an oak-dominated forest, and regeneration is possible, as small — some only a few inches — new pine trees lined the trails of Tashmoo Woods in early September.

This isn’t a new hurdle for Sheriff’s Meadow. The Times reported last year that 2,000 pitch pine and white pine trees infected or deemed at risk at the 69-acre Phillips Preserve, near Lake Tashmoo in Tisbury, were cut down and hauled away. (Sheriff’s Meadow owns both properties.) The area’s been closed to the public, but pine trees have grown back, and in areas cleared, where more light can come in, young oak trees have shot up as well, Moore said.

But in West Chop Woods, there was a different approach taken than in Phillips Preserve, one that focused on safety, because the area is much more residential. Even power companies are involved, because the dead trees can fall on power lines and start a fire. Trees are cut near homes and the edges of the trails, but Moore said he’s left the interior mostly alone.

Moore said that the Southern pine beetle is a species native to the Eastern Seaboard (though Island pine forests grew an entire lifetime sans the pine beetles), but have only been noticed in an “outbreak condition” on the Island since 2023.

Southern pine beetles, Moore said, have worked their way up the East Coast as winters have warmed, and “made it to New Jersey and then Long Island” and then flew over or blew in the wind over to the islands.

“And lo and behold, there are a lot of pine trees here,” which the beetles found very much to their liking, Moore said.

Sheriff’s Meadow also has a property in Chilmark on Tea Lane, where Southern pine beetles have infected and killed all the pitch pines. Moore said there’s also a concern there for power lines, roads, and houses in the area. The plan is to cut down “a ring” of dead trees around the property for safety purposes, but trees in the interior of the property can stand dead as wildlife habitat, he added. “That’s far away from Vineyard Haven,” he said in reference to a spread of the insect across the Island.

They’ve also begun to make their way to Oak Bluffs. Moore, as a forester, has heard from several people in neighborhoods between Barnes and County Roads in Oak Bluffs that there are infected trees there. Though he hasn’t gone to do an inspection yet, based on what he’s heard, he expects that the beetles have jumped over the Lagoon and killed trees there as well.

In Edgartown, Sherriff’s Meadow is in the process of work at Caroline Tuthill Preserve to enable the mature pine forest to potentially survive an outbreak. They’ve thinned 15 acres of that property, and plan to thin at least 15 more over the winter. 

Back in Tashmoo, and despite the less-than-ideal project, Gilchrist said he isn’t worried that the property might go from a forest to a desert. The number of trees marked to be taken down is a small percentage of all those in the area, he said.

For Gilchrist, this could be a long-term improvement, and mean that oaks and other plants in the area can thrive. “We see this as a short-term issue, and we’ll have a long-term benefit of even more attractive areas in our association,” he said.

“Most of us who live here have an abiding love for both the Island and the special place on the Island that we live, and we all feel that the special nature of Tashmoo Woods is what we’re all dedicated to preserving,” Gilchrist said.