Beetles Winning The War

The man in charge of Kelowna's urban forests has an ominous prediction for the summer of 2007.

Urban Forestry Supervisor, Ian Wilson says we will likely be overcome by pine beetles this year.

"I don't think we are going to win this war. We think we're going to be overwhelmed with the beetles that are breeding in the higher elevations and there's huge numbers of them," says Wilson.

He says the is no way to stop them from coming into the city.

"At this time, we're just trying to mitigate the damage."

Up until now, Wilson says, the city's approach to dealing with the destructive pine beetle has worked quite well.

He adds the beetles also appear to be changing their eating habits.

"They prefer the older pines, unfortunately, with the millions of beetles out there breeding, they've found that in places like Kamloops, beetles are attacking trees as small as seven centimetres in diameter."

Wilson says this is not the first outbreak of the pine beetle in Okanagan forests.

"There was a really big outbreak in the Okanagan and the Southern Interior in the early 1900's that wiped out a lot of the pine trees, so it does go through a natural cycle."

He says, because we have been so good at suppressing fires over the past 50 years, there are lots of old mature pines in the forest and that's what the beetles love.

Kelowna has roughly 350 thousand pine trees in the 6000 hectares of natural forest within city boundaries and on city and private property.