CRATER LAKE Report: Battle Against Bark Beetles

The Battle Against Bark Beetles in Crater Lake National Park: 1925-34 by Boyd E. Wickman United States Department of Agriculture U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station General Technical Report PNW-GTR-259, June 1990 CONTENTS Table of Contents Abstract Introduction Activities In 1925—The First Year Events From 1926 Through 1928 Events of 1929 and 1930 Events in 1930-31 Events From 1932 to 1934—The Final Years of the Battle The Aftermath Footnotes

Wickman, Boyd E. 1990. The battle against bark beetles in Crater Lake National Park: 1925-34. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-259. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 40 p.

This history records the first large-scale bark beetle control project in a National Park in the Pacific Northwest. It describes the relations between Park Service, Forest Service, and USDA Bureau of Entomology personnel; how the project was organized; the ecological implications of the outbreak; and the long-term results of direct control measures.

Keywords: Bark beetles, Crater Lake National Park, control, Bureau of Entomology, Forest Service, insect outbreaks.

The tide of the control battle has ebbed and flowed. The control forces have given the enemy repeated setbacks, but until recently the beetles on the southern front have had their forces strengthened by reinforcements from the north. The northern reserves are now depleted, and the remnants of the beetle army are widely dispersed and rendered ineffective with only a few concentrated groups operating in territory outside the former battlefields. The ultimate victory is now in sight. [1]

Figure 1—General view of Ghost Forest near Desert Crater. Lodgepole pine north of Crater Lake were killed by mountain pin beetle before 1924.

If this sounds like war, it was. The protection of the lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta Dougl. ex Loud.) forests of Crater Lake National Park from destruction by the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) has engaged the attention of the National Park Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service and Bureau of Entomology, since 1925, and despite Entomologist F.P. Keen's optimism in 1930, the war was far from over.

Let us go back a few years and see how this quasi-war of man against beetles began and why so much effort and money was expended to win the "ultimate victory." In 1923, the Superintendent of Crater Lake National Park requested help from the Bureau of Entomology because groups of lodgepole pine in the northern portion of the park were being killed by the mountain pine beetle. Because the dominant tree within the park was lodgepole pine, Park Superintendent Colonel C.G. Thomson visualized the park would become a "windblown, sandy desert without the lodgepole pines." [2] During that summer, John E. Patterson responded for the Bureau from its Ashland, Oregon, field station and made a first examination of the outbreak. Because the Park Service had no funding for insect control in 1924, plans were made to do a more extensive survey in summer 1924 and to request funds to start control operations in 1925.

Figure 2—Dead lodgepole pine in Ghost Forest were killed before 1924.

The epidemic apparently started 10 years earlier in National Forest stands northeast of the park near Diamond Lake and spread slowly southward killing from 50 to 90 percent of the stand as it progressed. [3]

In the National Parks, the commercial value of a tree species was irrelevant. Trees provided cover and scenic back drop and the policy at that time was to protect them from fire or insects at almost all costs. As we shall see later in the story, it was a losing battle. And though the beetles essentially won the war, the lessons learned helped bring on a more ecologically enlightened management style decades later.

The purpose of this story is to point out how foresters, land managers, and entomologists reacted to an insect outbreak in Crater Lake National Park during the early 1900s, the lessons they learned, the development of new technology, and how lessons from the past have helped to shape our current pest management policies. Neither the Forest Service nor the Park Service changed or curtailed their bark beetle control policies overnight. The changes took many years and came about after many experiences similar to the one chronicled here.

Figure 3—Lodgepole pine killed by mountain pine beetle, Castle Creek area, Crater Lake National Park, October 1930.

Crater Lake was not the only National Park with insect problems. Several others also requested funds to control insects at the time, but the situation at Crater Lake may have been the most serious because of the importance of lodgepole pine as forest cover and the intensity and magnitude of the beetle outbreak. Therefore in late July 1924, Patterson, F.P. Keen, J.M. Miller, and F.C. Craighead of the Bureau of Entomology made a survey of the beetle outbreak. In a report to H.C. Albright, National Park Service Director, Patterson pointed out the gravity of the situation (see footnote 3) and requested $5,000 to start the campaign. It so happened that in 1925 the emergency bill for the U.S. Department of the Interior provided $25,000 for the suppression of insect epidemics in National Parks. This was the first specific appropriation for insect control work in National Parks, and Crater Lake got its share. [4]

The control project in that first year needs to be described in some detail because it set a pattern for future events. [5] To do that, a little must also be known about the technical leader of the project Assistant Entomologist, John E. Patterson, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Entomology, field station in Ashland, Oregon. [6] John Patterson joined the Bureau of Entomology, Division of Forest Insect Investigations, at its Ashland field station in 1914. Before transferring to the Bureau of Entomology as an entomological ranger, he was a guard at Crater National Forest. He had a varied career earner as a photographer, surveyor's helper, railroad signal installer, and salesman of packing house products. He was a well-liked and highly competent self-taught entomologist. He published papers on several bark beetle and insect defoliator problems. He was in charge of the Ashland field station from 1921 to 1924 and served as assistant station leader of the Bureau of Entomology's Berkeley laboratory during the last 8 years of his career. He retired in July 1950 and died on July 31, 1962, in Ashland (see footnote 6).

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