Maple Sugaring. David K. Leff

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      KILLERS ARE ON THE LOOSE. Invading aliens are attacking the old industrial city of Worcester, Massachusetts, and surrounding towns. Almost thirty-four thousand street and yard trees in 110 square miles, largely maples, have disappeared. An additional fourteen hundred acres of forested land have been stripped of maples, birches, and elms. Entire residential neighborhoods are practically denuded, leaving barren streets and unshaded homes. The invaders have coal-black bodies stippled with white spots, six bluish feet, and striped antennae that can be more than twice their body length. Fearsome-looking creatures, they are fortunately no more than an inch and a quarter long.

      It sounds like a science fiction plot from some Hollywood B movie requiring a superhero’s intervention. But there’s no unspeakable horror threatening from outer space, and the courageous champion fighting this calamity is neither more powerful than a locomotive nor leaps tall buildings at a single bound. He’s a soft-spoken entomologist with a beard and ponytail who wears jeans and work boots.

      If you think the mundane terrestrial origins of this animal or its diminutive size is reason not to fear the end of maple trees in our region, then you probably are not aware that the American chestnut was once a dominant forest tree throughout most of New England, used for everything from fence rails to pianos and utility poles, until a blight caused by nearly invisible fungal spores imported from Asia wiped out almost all of them in little more than a generation. Persistent stump sprouters, these woodland giants are now just an occasional large shrub. Look at some old postcards and marvel at the colonnades of grand elms that once graced the avenues of almost every town and city in the Northeast and Midwest until Dutch elm disease made quick work of them, leaving once-leafy neighborhoods as barren as the residential streets in the Greendale and Burncoat neighborhoods of Worcester are today.

      So far, the Asian long-horned beetle (Anoplophora glabripennis), or ALB, as it is popularly known, has remained a scourge of urban areas because, as crossroads of international commerce, they are likely to receive nonnative invasive species as unwanted hitchhikers on pallets and in shipping containers delivered to the businesses clustered there. No commercial sugarbush has yet been affected, but ALB has been a hot topic at maple meetings and around evaporators for several years. If “established here, it could be one of the most destructive and costly invasive species ever to enter the United States,” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The insect is capable of riddling a tree with three-eighths-inch borings, about a taphole’s diameter, and not only compromise its vascular system, but weaken its structural integrity so severely that the trees fall apart and simply collapse. Uncontrolled, ALB could quickly spread to sugar orchards and put an end to syrup production. ALB kills trees. It could kill an entire food industry.

      With piercing blue eyes, a marquee-quality name, and a fierce determination to fulfill a mission, Clint McFarland is one of the Worcester area’s leading antagonists of ALB. He works for USDA’S Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service—better known by its acronym APHIS—as project director of ALB eradication. On a snow-frosted January day we met at his office, a sprawling single-story structure on the outskirts of downtown. He escorted me to a small room among a warren of crowded cubicles. The tight space was busy with cabinets, a couple of desks, computer terminals, and teetering piles of paper. A soft-voiced man of energetic enthusiasm preaching a gospel of awareness, he was eager for me to meet the beetles, because a heads-up public was the best weapon against spread of the scourge.

      Often citizens are the first to find new infestations, like the woman who discovered the insects in her yard and worried that they might bite or sting her grandchildren. Tracking down an image of ALB with a few keystrokes on her computer, she discovered that government authorities were interested in sightings. Within twelve hours, a SWAT team of bug hunters was in her yard taking down the trees.

      Keen to have me know his nemesis in all its manifestations, McFarland gathered illustrations, vials, bags, mounted specimens, chunks of wood, and other show-and-tell objects from around the room, explaining each in exact detail, like an athlete or hunter showing off his trophies. Onto СКАЧАТЬ