THE ASH baseball bat could be going the way of the game’s old flannel uniforms — and it won’t be by choice. An invasive species from Asia, the emerald ash borer, is munching its way through millions of the hardwood trees in North America. The continent could lose this useful tree as suddenly as it lost the American chestnut and the elm.
The insect was first detected in the United States in Michigan in 2002. Since then, it has spread east, west, and south. There have been no confirmed detections of the borer in New England, but it was recently discovered in New York’s Catskill Mountains, just to the west of Connecticut and Massachusetts. As environmental pests, it joins the Asian long-horned beetle, another invasive species but one with an appetite for a broader range of trees than the emerald borer.
One step Bay Staters can take to slow both beetles’ march is to avoid bringing home firewood from a campsite or second home. Scientists believe the borer in other states has leap-frogged into distant forests in firewood logs. For its part, the state Department of Conservation and Recreation won’t let campers in any of its forests bring firewood. New York state has gone even further — limiting any shipment of ash, including lumber and nursery trees, outside of one particularly hard-hit quarantine zone.
After the arrival of both these beetles, the United States began requiring Asian shippers to heat or fumigate their wooden crates and pallets to kill insects. But this precaution may have come too late for the ash tree, which has supplied so many of this country’s tool handles, and bows, as well as baseball bats.
