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Tree-killing bug hits Champion park especially hard
By Ed Runyan
CHAMPION
As the emerald ash borer has made its steady death march across Trumbull County in recent years, it has feasted on ash trees, eating them from the inside out.
For areas with a small number of ash trees, the ash borer hasn’t been a big deal, but the situation at one of the Trumbull County MetroParks has been much more serious.
As many as eight years ago, MetroParks officials started to notice tree death in the Clarence Darrow MetroPark on the north side of Educational Highway, across from Kent State University at Trumbull. It is home to the 18-hole Young’s Run disc golf course, and about 90 percent of the trees on one part of the course are ash.
Zachary Svette, operations director for Trumbull MetroParks, said he doesn’t believe that section was planted with ash trees on purpose. It is more likely that it occurred naturally.
Contract employee Bruce Clary and later Svette thought the tree death in the park was significant enough to begin buying replacement trees and planting them eight years ago – 75 to 100 per year. A state forester also warned that emerald ash borer was coming eventually, so they should start to prepare.
Four years ago, Alan Siewert, an urban forester with the Middlefield office of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, finally found evidence that the emerald ash borer had started to invade Trumbull County when he spotted telltale signs of its destruction in ash trees along U.S. Route 422 in Southington. His findings were reported in The Vindicator.
But MetroParks officials, including Svette, still weren’t certain what was causing the problem at Clarence Darrow until this spring, when tree death increased and Svette talked on the phone with Siewert while looking at one of the park’s ash trees, describing the curvy patterns under the bark and the “D” shaped exit holes the beetle makes in the bark.
Siewert confirmed that the problem resulted from emerald ash borers.
“I said ‘What should I do?’ And he said, “Cut ’ em down.’” That’s when Svette and Clary began to plan in earnest to address the problem.
In the past month, they have cut down about 200 ash trees on four holes of the disc golf course. The MetroParks plans to continue to plant trees to replace the dead ones in a ratio of one new tree for every four that come down.
That plan, coupled with the 850 trees planted in the past eight years, should enable the park to continue to give disc golfers and other visitors the wooded character they enjoy, Svette said.
Most of the replacement trees are pines and maples.
The wooded nature of the course has made it challenging and interesting — much like tree-lined fairways make a traditional golf course challenging and interesting, Svette said.
The removal of so many trees recently has not been welcomed by the disc golfers, but they understand that it has to be done, Svette said.
Unfortunately, new trees can be damaged by being hit too many times with a golf disc, so MetroParks personnel have been placing logs in the ground in front of young trees as a buffer between the discs and the young trees.
Svette said he could have tried to cut down the dead trees and replant them all at once, but the cost would have been $25,000 or more, which would have used up a quarter of his budget for the year.
Svette said a large percentage of the new trees have come from the tree sale by the Trumbull County Soil and Water Conservation District, but he also buys trees from traditional home stores at the end of the season when the prices are lowest, and he’s received donations from disc golfers and neighbors near the park.