East Hampton Town's Ravaged, 'Ill Thriven' Pitch Pine Forests

East Hampton Town’s pitch pine forests have been ravaged by the southern pine borer more than any other Long Island community’s.

Near the end of this summer, the Napeague pitch pines began to suffer mortally at the hands of this tiny beetle — hundreds had to be cut down, the preferred method used by the State Department of Environmental Conservation to stop the advance of this terrible disease.

For the past several thousand years, these East Hampton pitch pines have been marching toward Montauk, which, except for a small contingent in the Walking Dunes at the hamlet’s western edge, has yet to become inhabited by this tree species.

When the pitch pine, Pinus rigida, first arrived on Long Island from New Jersey, it was following on the heels of the taiga, or eastern boreal forest, retreating to the north as the island warmed.

Once here, the pitch pine burgeoned in population and formed the bulk of what we call the Long Island Central Pine Barrens. The major portion of Long Island’s pitch pine lands is found in Brookhaven, Riverhead and Southampton townships.

Orient and Montauk, the two communities on the North and South Forks situated farthest east from New York City, have never had this tree species. A few years after George Washington became our first president, he took a trip to Long Island and referred to the pitch pines as “ill thriven.” Was he looking at the famous dwarf pitch pines of Westhampton, or the acres and acres of normal pitch pines? We can’t be sure.

Even though eastern Southampton Town and western East Hampton Town have been blessed with acres and acres of pitch pine-oak forests, the governments of the South Fork fought against including those pitch pine forests in the now famous Long Island Pine Barrens Preserve created in 1993.

Ironically, perhaps, Jay Schneiderman, the supervisor of East Hampton Town when it fought against inclusion, but now the supervisor of Southampton Town, and a member of the four-member committee presiding over the preserve, finds himself in charge of all of the town’s pine barrens, including all those both east and west of the Shinnecock Canal.

That committee meets as frequently as monthly and is made up of the county supervisor and the supervisors of Brookhaven, Riverhead and Southampton. Oversight of the day-to-day activities in the Long Island Pine Barrens area, now more than 100,000 acres in size, is the job of the Central Pine Barrens planning staff, directed by Judy Jakobsen, with a main office in Westhampton Beach. The Long Island Pine Barrens Society, run by Dick Amper, keeps watch on the Central Pine Barrens activities and has had a weekly TV program for several years, presently broadcast by SEA-TV of Southampton.

The pitch pine as a species extends from New York State south into New Jersey, where it thrives, then into southern pine country, where it peters out. New Jersey’s prime pinelands, officially the National Pinelands Reserve, was created in 1978, consists of more than 1 million acres and is protected by the federal, state and local governments working together. It is the first such “reserve” in the United States.

The southern pine borer reached the New Jersey pitch pines in 2013 and has been killing pitch pine trees ever since. Last year alone, more than 14,000 acres of pitch pines were destroyed. The southern pine borer, less than 4 mm in total size, has a harder time killing those southern pines, which reach to 100 feet and more in height, and is successfully fended off by white pines, Pinus strobus, which can be quite resinous and exude sap to the degree that any pine borer holes are “sapped up” as soon as drilled.

The pitch pines comprising more than 50 percent of East Hampton’s Northwest Woods are pretty much all diseased and dead or dying, while the white pines, hardly touched, are thriving. One merely has to drive down Bull Path off Swamp Road to see how well the white pines are doing.

Interestingly, no other woods on Long Island are populated by large numbers of white pines. During pre-Revolutionary times, the largest of these white pines could not be cut down by order of the kings of Great Britain, as many were to serve as masts on British sailing ships. There are a handful of white pines in the southern part of Shelter Island; The Nature Conservancy’s Mashomack Preserve has several large ones.

The tiny southern pine beetle is easily overlooked until it creates havoc in the phloem and cambium of the pitch pine, as it has been doing on Long Island since the fall of 2014, according to DEC reports. However, the Bustamante photo taken at that time shows just one of several dead pitch pines that must have been attacked much earlier, possibly in the spring of 2014, but most likely in 2013.

Once attacked the pitch pine eventually dies, and the scions of the borers attack the next nearest pitch pine, and so on and so on down the line. Soon, an entire area of pitch pines as, say, happened where the Sunrise Highway runs into State Route 24, is dead and needle-less.

In the given case the State DEC acted with other state agencies and local agencies to quickly cut down the diseased trees, stopping the spread of the borer in its tracks. I have taken that road north to Riverhead several times since, and the pines beyond the treated area on both sides are apparently managing.

In 2015, in East Hampton, the pitch pines around the Barcelona Neck Road/Sag Harbor Golf Course area fell victim to the southern pine borer and began to be cut down. Pitch pines in that area continued to be cut down thereafter in cooperative efforts between the state and the town ever since. In 2018 alone, 2,466 pitch pines were cut down, according to a DEC publication.

But despite the continued tree removal program, these efforts have proved fruitless — the pitch pines in East Hampton’s Northwest Woods area continue to die off with each passing year. Southampton Town is just as pitch pine rich but has a much smaller number of dead pitch pines

And this year, while pitch pine losses have almost come to a halt in Southampton, the pesky borer is spreading south, almost to the ocean, killing trees in East Hampton’s southern parts en masse, as well as those all the way east into Napeague. The state just recently cut down more than 2,000 pitch pines there.

The Napeague pitch pines are less than 60 years of age and stop the erosion of the sandy soils in which their roots sit as low as 6 feet above sea level. Thus, one expects the winter northwesterlies to push a lot more sand southward than normally, which could dramatically change Napeague’s ecosystem and, perhaps, the stability of Montauk Highway, which runs several miles through Napeague all the way to Montauk.

If Washington were to revisit today, he would definitely find those same pines “ill thriven.”