State Begins Cutting Down Hundreds Of Trees In Napeague To Fight Infestation

The sound of chainsaws echoed through the sand dunes of Napeague last week as New York State parks employees began cutting down hundreds of pitch pine trees infested with southern pine beetles in Napeague State Park and Hither Hills State Park — with more than 1,800 trees marked for removal.

The beetles have already killed more than 500 trees in Napeague and another 1,300 are flagged as infested with the beetles.

Infested trees have been found on both sides of the highway, but the largest stands are north of the Long Island Rail Road tracks, west of Napeague Meadow Lane, where the bright colored ribbons around infested trees abound.

Just seven trees in the mammoth Hither Hills State Park have been identified as infested and have already been cut down, according to George Gorman, the New York State Department of Parks and Recreation’s regional director for Long Island. No trees in Montauk Point State Park have yet been found to be infested.

As of Tuesday, state employees had felled 150 trees in Napeague, working just off the south side of Montauk Highway. More park staff will be sent to help as they become available, Gorman said, and the parks department is also working with the state Department of Environmental Conservation on getting funding to bring in a contracted cutting crews to tackle the cutting of the large areas of infestation north of the railroad tracks.

“The reality is, we have to address it,” Gorman said. “We’ve seen the devastation that the beetles can cause in western Suffolk and Nassau County in all the state parks. It was depressing, frankly, when we discovered that they’d found their way here.”

The southern pine beetle is native to the southern United States, but has spread northward in recent decades as warmer winters have allowed the bugs to survive from season to season. They were first found in Suffolk County in 2014.

The beetles, which are about the size of a grain of rice, bore into trees just below their bark and create small tunnels as they munch away, gradually interrupting the flow of nutrients through the tree, killing it within a matter of months. By the time the tree has died, the beetles will typically have moved on.

“They start to die from the top down — you can see it start to show up at the top, it gets brown,” said Scott Pitches, one of the state crewmen felling trees in Napeague on Friday.

The one vulnerability the beetles have is that they cannot fly very far and an infested tree that is cut down is believed to effectively neutralize the beetles within it. Infested trees can be identified by numerous small bubbles of sap on the exterior of the bark, the tree’s natural defenses trying to expel the attacking pests.

In 2017, East Hampton Town declared a state of emergency after thousands of trees in Northwest were found to be infested. Over two years, town staff and sawyers hired by the state cut down some 17,000 trees — leaving broad swaths of pitch pine woodlands along Swamp Road entirely denuded. The aggressive clear cutting had seemed to stanch the spread of the pest, but last fall town land managers discovered the scourge had simply moved south, with more than 2,000 trees found to be infested in the woods surrounding East Hampton Airport in Wainscott. Barely a month later, the infestation in Napeague was discovered.

The state is still methodically surveying areas of the its vast parklands in Montauk and Napeague, and Gorman said that regular monitoring will likely be needed for the foreseeable future.

“This will be an ongoing project into the summer and probably intermittently for a long time,” he said. “As we spot it, we are going to have to take action right away.”