Crow’s Nest: Ash Tree Management Update

By Daniel Barringer, Preserve Manager

We’ve started the next step of ash tree management to reduce the number of ash trees along our roads before they die (from Emerald Ash Borer) and become a hazard. We contracted the removal of 16 trees or clumps of trees, less than 10% of what occurs along roadsides at Crow’s Nest.

Some of the wood is given away to neighbors for firewood, some is left to become the nurse logs for a future forest, and some is chipped to provide material to surface our trails. We’ve started with the more difficult trees, around wires and close to the roads, but there are plenty more to go. Notably it’s easier and safer to work with trees that are not dead and brittle.

Below, Aubrey hauls a log out of a roadside hedgerow.

Emerald Ash Borer was recently found in Philadelphia, and is present in all the counties around us, and it is 100% fatal in untreated trees (we’re also treating about a dozen ash trees with insecticide so that when the borer dies out after it wipes out its host, the tree species will not be extirpated from our region).