DYINGFORESTS
The Seward Highway is the main thoroughfare south from Anchorage.
It runs down the Kenai Peninsula to the small, attractive fishing town
of Seward, diverging en route into the Sterling Highway, which leads
to the equally small, and perhaps even more stunning, fishing town of
Homer. It is a devastatingly beautiful stretch of highway, alternately
revealing stunning mountain vistas, the still waters of Cook Inlet, and
long stretches of coniferous forest. A closer look at the trees that cover
the hillsides, however, reveals that all is not well with that forest. Huge
stretches of them are dry and colorless, weak, dying or dead. They are
victims of the spruce bark beetle, which has killed Sitka-white spruce
hybrids over an area in excess of 3 million acres of south-central
Alaska. The beetle uses sensitive antennae to detect subtle chemical
signals from spruce that are slightly weakened, stressed, or diseased;
these trees, less able to resist the beetle’s attack, are its favored targets.
After laying its eggs in its victim, the beetle then itself emits hormones,
attracting additional beetles to the site. Soon, the tree is overwhelmed
by the attentions of literally thousands of beetles, and is killed.
On drives along the Seward and Sterling Highways, and on hikes
through Chugach State Park that overlooks the Anchorage Basin, I
have seen this widespread devastation repeatedly. (Indeed, the spruce
tree that once stood proudly outside my cabin ultimately succumbed to
a siege of bark beetles, whereupon it was cut down, ultimately provid-
ing valuable warmth from my fireplace over the winter.) Now, one
bright summer afternoon, on an island in Prince William Sound—the
beautiful stretch of water most famous, tragically, for the obscenity vis-
ited upon it in 1989 by the oil tanker Exxon Valdez—I come face to face
with the bark beetle’s unwitting accomplice in the assault on Alaska’s
conifers. I am with Dr. Glenn Juday, a forest expert with the University
of Alaska, Fairbanks, and we are in search of the western black-headed
budworm. The search does not take long; with a triumphant “Aha!”
Juday beckons me to a nearby spruce, and points to the tell-tale sign—
spruce needles bound tightly shut—of the western black-headed bud-
worm. After hatching, budworm larvae burrow their way into the buds
of Sitka spruce and suture them with their silk. After feeding on the
Alaska and the Western Arctic 99