Bronze Birch Borer: What to Know + Its Impact on Trees

Tyson Geldseth from Davey's Tacoma office shares information about bronze birch borer, including its fatal impact on trees and the steps you can take to minimize its effects on your landscape. 

In this episode we cover:  

• Bronze birch borer (:43)
• The severity of bronze birch borer (2:44)
• Is it too late to treat a tree infected by bronze birch borer? (4:12)
• Preventative measures for bronze birch borer (7:15)
• The size of birch trees in the Northwest (9:10)
• The expense of tree permitting and regulations in Tyson's area (10:57)
• The expense of cutting down older trees (12:56)
• Calling a certified arborist to examine your property (15:17)
• How Tyson got into the tree industry (17:15)
• Emerald ash borer (21:38)
• EAB's estimated arrival in Washington state (23:10)
• Preparation for EAB (24:14)
• The feeling of providing client-focused solutions (25:50)

To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.

To learn more about bronze birch borer, visit our Insect & Disease Resource Center, Bronze Birch Borer Damage & Treatments | Davey Tree.

To learn more about boring pests, read our blog, Tree Borers: Signs of Tree Boring Insects | Davey Tree. 

Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
Twitter: @DaveyTree
Facebook: @DaveyTree
Instagram: @daveytree
YouTube: The Davey Tree Expert Company
LinkedIn: The Davey Tree Expert Company 

Connect with Doug Oster at www.dougoster.com. 

Have topics you'd like us to cover on the podcast? Email us at podcasts@davey.com. We want to hear from you!

Transcript

[music]

Doug Oster: Welcome to the Davey Tree Expert Company's podcast, Talking Trees. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Each week, our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists' favorite trees, and much, much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more because here at the Talking Trees podcast, we know trees are the answer. I'm joined this week by Tyson Geldseth. He's a district manager at Tacoma, Washington, for the Davey Tree Expert Company. Today, we're talking about a couple boring pests. They're not very boring, but they do bore into trees. Tyson, welcome to the show. How are you?

Tyson Geldseth: Good. Thanks for having me today.

Doug: Let's start off with your least favorite borer.

Tyson: Will do. The bronze birch borer is really what we're thinking to go into today. Really, it's a horrible pest. Everybody's heard of EAB. I think it's covered extensively. Everybody knows that that goes after ash. The bronze birch borer goes after pretty much all birch trees of any color. Everything is acceptable. The only one that doesn't get hit is typically river birch. That's a pretty wide range. Everybody loves birch because they can be a good centerpiece tree. If you have a birch, they are an absolute magnet for this pest.

Doug: How does a homeowner know if the tree is under attack?

Tyson: The best way to think about bronze birch borer, like EAB, some of these other borers, is to have a preventative mindset. If you have a birch and it's not a river birch, it should simply be getting a preventative treatment. Even a healthy one should be getting a treatment either yearly or every two years to keep this pest away. You'll know if your birch is getting attacked by bronze birch borer because you'll see the damage from the top down. It'll kill the upper canopy. That's when you see it first, especially if it gets hot. The top third of branches typically starts to thin and then die back.

Birch is really soft, easily rotten wood. Once things start to go, it happens very quickly. You can see a really fast change over the course of just a couple months when this pest starts to come in.

Doug: This is an infestation for you, right? If you're treating a tree before you're seeing signs of damage, this is serious.

Tyson: It's a tree killer. I know of HOAs that it's wiped out hundreds of their HOA right-of-way trees along the road. You can imagine a nice neighborhood, high-end neighborhood, where the streets on both sides are lined by these nice white pillars. That's the thing with birch. The trunks look gorgeous. Entire neighborhoods are losing these birch trees and have lost them. I even know of a very well-known membership-only store brand out there, warehouse style. Their corporate campus lost over 50 birch alone to this borer. It really is destructive. Once it gets into a property, it's incredibly hard to get on top of.

Another property around here that is well-known for making planes, for instance, they've got a single site that has lost. They're in the process of losing over 100 birch at one site right now just because of this pest.

Doug: If you don't treat in advance, is it too late? If you start to see the top of the tree defoliate, is that too late?

Tyson: The folks at Arborjet, a few different companies, they're doing testing to try to figure out exactly how much damage a tree can take while it's still feasible to treat it. What we tell clients, it is worth giving a shot to a tree if it's within your finance goals. If it's within your budget, it's worth giving it a shot. Probably if it's less than 30% of total canopy has declined. If you're over 30, it's probably not going to make it. If you've just got 30% damage level, total canopy, you've got a shot, but still, it's not 100%, you might be getting around more like 50% at that point. That's what Arborjet and those places are studying right now to try to figure out.

That's the thing with these birch trees. I think it's what sets them apart is that, typically, it's not uncommon, at least here in Washington, for them to be a centerpiece tree. These are the trees that people put as their front entryway. I can think of a lot of properties have them at the front of their homes. They're lining the roads in HOAs. They're the trees that are being used as-- they're used to draw people's attention in their landscape. It's more of a hit to lose them. It definitely changes the complete look of a property that's going for white trunk trees to suddenly all of them died.

Doug: In the case of some big company that has them or a big HOA that has them, basically, no one's even noticing. Then by the time they notice, it's too late.

Tyson: Yes. A lot of times, what happens, I don't even know these things. Honestly, like bronze birch bore, the larva is what causes the damage. It's making little galleries under the bark. They say one to two years is the timeframe that the larvae are under the bark in a birch. That's a long time for damage to slowly be happening. What happens is everybody is busy. Nobody's looking up and inspecting the trees every day. It's really easy for a year to go by. Then the people in HOAs call us out, and they're asking us to save trees when half of a whole HOA might already be dead. At that point, it is a heavy infestation, so our chances of success are lower.

Doug: No one's looking up at the trees except you.

Tyson: Unfortunately, yes, once we come out to the property.

Doug: What's the treatment? What should be done before they see signs of damage to make sure that the tree is going to stay healthy?

Tyson: For the bronze birch bore, it's very similar to some other common bores. We have seen a lot of success. The most financially feasible option is usually to do basically a systemic soil injection every single late summer, early fall. That is a time-tested, proven method that's going to keep your trees as healthy as possible without blowing the budget. If this is a high-end centerpiece tree, though, then it does make sense to get into more focused care. For those trees, we do recommend doing an actual trunk injections with an Arborjet product. That is, it takes more time, it's more material. More material and time means more cost.

The benefit, though, is that those treatments, they work very well, they have a higher efficacy rate, but also we can make them last for two years. Instead of having to do yearly injections into the soil, we're able to do a trunk injection, potentially every two years, for a little bit better control. Some other benefits, too, around that, if its focus is going in the trunk, we're not putting as many insecticides in the environment that other plants and flowers could be uptaking. That is a direction that is great if the property and budget fit it.

Doug: How big do the trees get in your climate in general? I know there's different species and such, but does this get to be a big tree out there?

Tyson: Your regular HOA or commercial property, if they have birch, they're probably in the 40-foot range, but an old birch, it can get up to a good 70, 80 feet up here.

Doug: Oh, so we're talking also a big trunk, right?

Tyson: Yes. We're into the probably mid-20-inch on a lot of these older birch here. It's a good-sized tree. Removal, that's the other factor when you're talking about these borers. Removal can get extremely expensive fast. It's not just the cost for having a crew out. In a lot of jurisdictions up here, we also face some pretty heavy permitting fees and requirements. Those permits require a bunch of formal reports that can be extremely expensive alone. Cities also, I know of a city-- there's a jurisdiction here where if it's in the right location in the city, just the permit can be $2,000. You can imagine you throw in a $2,000 city fee.

Maybe you even need traffic control to set up next to this tree. You got to have flaggers, a right-of-way permit. That's all before we can even start charging for the work. It can be more expensive in the permitting than even taking a tree out, unfortunately. Anything we can do to save centerpiece trees so we don't have to go down all of the permitting and the red tape, it makes a lot of sense to give it a shot in these cases.

Doug: Man, oh, man, that permitting is a killer, and that just depends on the municipality, how they feel about cutting down a tree. If you were to leave that tree there, it's going to fall on something. It has to be cut down.

Tyson: Yes, different cities, and I'm assuming it's going this direction nationwide. Washington is pretty-- I would assume California is the same way, where there's a lot of groups that really just are trying to force cities to increase canopy cover. The way that the cities are doing that is by putting these permit requirements in place. Most of the time, they don't care if a tree is dead. They still want to go through the permit process. You still have to get a report, file that with the city. A lot of times, they have replanting requirements on top of that. It's extremely tricky, I would say, because it can be different from city to city. In some cities, it's also different from neighborhood to neighborhood.

It is crucial to have a certified arborist out that can double-check those requirements and just make sure that you're not setting yourself up for failure. With all that said, all of that red tape and everything, it's very unfortunate when somebody gets hit by unexpected costs. If we can go ahead and treat a birch for $200 yearly instead of having to charge $4,000 for removal and the permit process, it makes a lot of sense.

Doug: I'm sure you're telling your clients this because if that ever comes east, Tyson, here to Pittsburgh, I'm going bankrupt. I'm in an oak forest with oak wilt. The guys from Davey here are every six months taking down a tree. I want my tree canopy. I am replanting all these different types of trees to replace the oaks. Boy, if I had to pay $2,000 permit, oh, my gosh. I assume, too, when you're cutting down a tree, it's going to be more expensive if that tree has died or is dying. Is that right? Because you can't climb it, or am I wrong there?

Tyson: One thing I talk about to homeowners is it's the tricky truth that the longer something is dead, if it's big, it does get more expensive because it's going to be more complicated to remove. We actually do get in situations where, up here, we can get fir trees that are approaching 200 feet tall. They may not have access with any sort of equipment. The only way to remove those is via climber. What can happen up here, people, they don't notice. Things go on the back burner. It happens to everybody. You're procrastinating for whatever reason. Forget about it. Next thing you know, three years have passed. That tree, it might not actually be safe to climb anymore.

We've actually had to turn trees down in the past because there's simply no safe way to do them anymore. If there's no access behind, you can imagine a quadrant home-style complex. They've only got a couple feet between with over 100-foot-tall tree in the backyard to take out. Those people, if they end up having to get a special company in that has some special equipment, it ends up being tens of thousands, potentially, to take one of those trees out. It all could have been taken care of ahead of time with possibly just a simple, standard tree removal crew with a regular climber.

Doug: This is a good time to talk about having a certified arborist come to your property at least once a year. In my case, it's every six months. I'm sure you tell your clients, "Hey, let me come back. Let me take a look." People that are out there that would have a huge tree like that, it's a huge responsibility. You've got to keep an eye on it. You've got to have that certified arborist take a look, I think.

Tyson: It's incredibly important. Just the chances of finding something are surprisingly high. I've been with Davey for 17 years now. You never know when you walk onto a property for the first time what you're going to see. It's so easy to, as a homeowner, that doesn't-- this is simply just not a homeowner's business. You get used to things. I do it at my house. I'm sure that there are things wrong that I just don't see. They become invisible. Then you have somebody that's a specialist comes out, a professional, and they realize that that's exactly what happens to us constantly.

We can point out something that, if it isn't handled right away, could end up costing tens of thousands. It could fall on the house. It's incredible what can be easily missed. It's just amazing the small things that will lead a tree down a path to causing something severe to happen. They can linger there for a decade. You could have something that you noticed as a homeowner a decade ago. Simply, you thought five years ago, I should call somebody to look at it. Then, another five years, life happens. It's incredible how much time goes by so quickly.

Doug: Tyson, a great example is I'm hosting a Talking Trees podcast, and it took an arborist to look at this tree and say, "That thing is going to fall on your garage, maybe tomorrow." It's a huge oak tree. He had somebody out there right away. I'm walking by it every day and didn't know that it was hollow. It can happen to anybody. Now, I want to ask you a little bit about your job and how you got into it, and why it's right for you.

Tyson: Sure. I started my green industry career back in college. When I was a young high school student, honestly, I didn't want to be in an office all day, every day. Way back then, I decided I wanted to do something outdoors. I decided to go to Green River. At the time, it was a community college for their natural resource program. I went to school, basically, to learn how to become a timber cruiser. I went to college. I did an internship being a timber cruiser. I was out by Mount Rainier here in Washington. I lived in basically a trailer in Mineral, Washington there for about a year, total.

I did an internship, and I became a full-time employee for that company, cruising timber, doing basically plots and inventories, overseeing planting operations for a logging company.

Doug: What does that mean, timber cruiser? What does that mean?

Tyson: A timber cruiser, and this is an extremely popular job in the forestry realm. It's popular just because it's well-known. A timber cruiser is hired by typically either a property owner, property manager, or a logger. They will go to, basically, forests and put in plots throughout a forest on a grid style. Then they collect a bunch of data, and they use that to find out how much money worth of wood is there. That's a timber cruiser. They're trying to figure out the volume of forest for logging purposes, or it could be for doing wetland inventories, just doing habitat inventories. All of those would fall under the realm of a timber cruiser.

Doug: All right, so after you're done being a timber cruiser, what's next?

Tyson: As I was out doing that alone, and I would assume this is still the case across the whole country, I was on my way to a site one day. I was, like I said, living on the side of a mountain alone in a trailer provided by the company. It was an hour drive to be able to get cell phone service at the time, and I was a young buck. On the way to a site one day, I just randomly looked over and I saw a pickup truck that had a plywood box made onto the back of it. Clearly, a do-it-yourselfer or something, mom and pop, and then there was a climber in a tree next to that.

It was the first time I'd ever seen an arborist, an actual climber in a tree. Of course, it wasn't a professional example, but I thought, "Gosh, that looks like it'd be fun." Going into that winter, I went ahead and I actually found Davy Tree on Craigslist at the time. This was 2007. I went ahead, I fired over my application. I wanted to switch from being a timber cruiser to working in our city forests, basically. I wanted to be somewhere closer to home. That's really how I found Davy Tree. I liked that physical aspect of being a climber at the time. That's really what drew me in, the idea of being an outdoor worker and being able to have just that fun climbing element to the job.

Doug: Let's briefly discuss emerald ash borer. I know it's been covered like crazy, but tell me, out where you're at, are you seeing the emerald ash borer? Has it made it out there, or is it on its way? Where are you as far as the EAB is concerned?

Tyson: EAB, it has not yet been confirmed in Washington. I was actually just at an appointment the other day with, he's a supervisor that works with, I want to say he said AmeriCorps. It's one of those volunteer programs where they do the wetland restorations. His outfit is actually monitoring for EAB here in Washington. What they did is they brought in some decent-sized ash trees to some landfills where they do brush disposal. That's where they put out their monitoring stations, is at the landfills. The idea being that if anybody has EAB and they bring it into the landfill, their yard waste portion of it, that they'd be able to catch it because they're going to see activity.

They still have not here in Washington. It could change anytime. My assumption is that it probably is here because it's in Portland. Also, they have confirmed it in Vancouver, BC. Obviously, it didn't just skip us.

Doug: As a tree professional, what are you thinking about when this impending infestation is probably going to make its way to you?

Tyson: I'm assuming within the next year to two years, we're going to start seeing a bunch of activity. The thing about emerald ash borer is, it's actually very similar to the bronze birch borer. They're both flathead borers. They make the same D-shaped exit holes, similar damage on the trees, even. Ash and birch both decay fairly quickly once they start getting this borer damage. They both die from the top down. The difference with the ash trees is that they do get a little bit bigger faster than birch. Around here, it's not uncommon to have a good 30-inch diameter ash tree.

Once it does start hitting, we're just going to see a lot of folks have to take out a lot of large trees, which is going to be a big hit to homeowners.

Doug: I hope they're ready for it. I hope that they have been warned because out here on the East Coast, when it came through, people really didn't know what to expect. All of a sudden, it was too late. Since you guys are so far west, hopefully, people will be warned and ready when you guys start to see the EAB.

Tyson: The thing that I was talking to that contact I met with earlier this week, actually, from one of those volunteer outfits, and he was saying that ash was one of their go-to species for years when they're doing wetland restoration, just because it was so easy to get set up. They grow fairly on the higher end, but they were just an easy tree to throw in the ground. The biggest issue is that a lot of those areas that we put in ash, you put in a lot of money trying to get these nice trees and ecosystem going, are going to be suffering here. They won't necessarily be the most obvious trees here in Washington, although I'm sure we're going to have a bunch, but it's going to have a pretty big impact.

I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a whole bunch of just black cottonwood come in and take the space, unfortunately. Cottonwood is invasive here. You still have to have a permit to remove it, though, in most cities.

Doug: Tyson, before I let you go, tell me a little bit about what it's like for you to be working with your clients, and in many cases, save these birch trees. That has to be a good feeling.

Tyson: There's nothing better to be able to pull up to one of our clients' properties. They have three or four nice centerpiece birch trees in their front lawn that are looking nice and healthy, giving great curb appeal, and looking over at the neighbor and saying, "Gosh, I wish they would have gone for the proposal as well five years ago. Now, the top half of their trees are all dead." We know it works, and that's the best thing about being able to provide these services is that we can protect these trees, but we can only do that with a partnership with the clients.

It has to be give and take. If they see something, they need to let us know, and they need to be willing to call us to get that help. Otherwise, there's just no hope, whether it's bronze birch borer or ash trees. They have to be willing to call on our resources.

Doug: That's good stuff, Tyson. Thanks so much. Appreciate your time, and thanks for schooling us on that birch borer. It sounds awful, but, hey, you got the emerald ash borer to look forward to, right?

Tyson: [chuckles] Yes, one after the other.

Doug: All right. Thanks again. It was great talking to you.

Tyson: Thank you.

Doug: Tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees podcast from the Davey Tree Expert Company. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Just like every other week, I want you to do me a favor. Subscribe to this podcast so you'll never miss a show. You've got an idea for an episode, maybe a comment, two ways to reach us. Send us an email to podcasts@davey.com. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T-S @ D-A-V-E-Y.com. You can also click the link at the end of our show notes to text us a fan mail message. Your ideas might be on a future podcast, and we'd sure love to hear from you. As always, we like to remind you on the Talking Trees podcast, trees are the answer.

[00:28:11] [END OF AUDIO]