Emerald borer menace: 68,000 mature ash trees cut down around Toronto

National post
March 12, 2014
By Peter Kuittenbrouwer

Derek McBride, 72, lives on Forsythia Drive in Guildwood Village. A geologist, he has explored for mines around the world. When at home, he walks through the thick forests of Guildwood Park to the Scarborough Bluffs. Joining him is joyful Jazmine, a yellow Lab a miner gave him in Mexico.

Last month Mr. McBride came in for a shock. Logging crews cut down hundreds of his park’s mature ash trees.

Mr. McBride knows and likes trees. When he bought his house on Forsythia in 1982, a city-owned oak out front boasted a hole filled with carpenter ants.

“I killed the buggers with Malathion [an insecticide], filled it with mortar and tarred over the top,” he says. Today the oak looks great.

On Wednesday as heavy snow fell, Mr. McBride donned the beaver fur hat he bought at the Webequie First Nation, in northern Ontario. He and Jazmine walked me across Guildwood Parkway to the park. We passed corded rows of ash logs into what remains of the forest.

“This tree was 115 years old,” he says, clearing snow from a fresh stump. “I counted the rings.”

He points to a new clearing. “In here there was some lillies,” he says. “As long as you had your forest cover, it controlled the dog-strangling vine. You know what’s going to happen now.” As they fell, the ash smashed branches of other trees around them.

Toronto counts 860,000 ash trees. The city says the emerald ash borer will kill them all. Of the 80,000 mature ash trees on streets and in parks, the city has inoculated 12,000 with TreeAzin, says Beth McEwen, the city’s manager of forest renewal. They inoculated 400 big ash trees at Guildwood Park. Citywide, Toronto plans to cut down 68,000 mature ash.

“If the tree is going to die, if it is within striking distance of a trail, we need to cut it, because otherwise it would fall and potentially kill someone,” Ms. McEwen says.

The city wanted to cut these ash before the wet spring and busy summer, she says. City Purchasing was busy processing contracts for arborists cleaning up from the ice storm. So Toronto Forestry sole-sourced a $150,000 contract to Schmidt Logging of Newton, Ont. Through its contract to cut ash in five woodlots - Guildwood, South Marine Park, Centennial Woodlot, Major Abbas Ali Park and McLevin Woods - Schmidt estimates it can earn $85,000 selling saw logs for lumber, she adds.

Here’s the odd part of the city’s logic. The city has done no maintenance in Guildwood Park in 30 years, Mr. McBride says. “I figure I can buy about a case of beer a year from the beer bottles I’ve redeemed,” he says. On our walk we pass many standing dead trees. Foresters know to leave dead trees standing as habitat. Given the city’s benign neglect here, why the sudden rush to cut all the ash now?

Mr. McBride speculates the motivation was to cash in on the ash logs. Ms. McEwan insists that the trees felled were infested with the ash borer. The logs, though, appear pristine.

Dr. Sandy Smith, a professor in the University of Toronto forestry faculty, generally takes the city’s side in this discussion.

“Unless those ash trees had been injected to protect them against EAB, they had essentially no chance of surviving,” she writes in an email. “Cutting in winter … is much easier on the soil and site.”

Recovering the lost canopy will take decades, notes Ms. Smith. That is a good reason to treat our existing forests with a bit more care.