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October 28, 2008

Dreaming big to save the Redbay

By Janisse Ray

Every time I go to the woods, I expect amazement – crashing black bear, glimpse of a panther – and last week’s kayak trip on Cathead Creek was no exception.

At the canoe outpost in Darien, guide Danny Grisette has wall-papered topo maps floor to ceiling. When I arrived, he traced where we’d be exploring, through the canals of a historic rice field into Buffalo Swamp, drained by Cathead Creek, a tributary of the Altamaha River.

As we paddled through banks of Southern wild rice and red-stemmed amaranth hanging with seed, I grooved on how gorgeous fall is in Georgia. The maples are deep as burgundy wine, tupelos flash and fling their red sequins. Sweet gums are pasted with gold stars.

I mean, I was ecstatic. The skies were clear and the air iridescent. The sun was canted and calm. The day was mind-blowingly, awesomely, incredibly beautiful, the way fall is down here.

We saw woodpeckers. We heard deer and wild hogs. Best of all, we got to see a rattlesnake about as big as a telephone pole (OK, not quite) swimming across the creek. Swimming! Just as happy as you please!

But I saw something else. Among the cypress and maple, tupelo and gum, I saw redbay dying.

Entire trees, large and small, were dead: Extinction in progress.

Redbay is an evergreen with wide, aromatic leaves that is taken for granted in Southern forests. You don’t pay much attention until you notice how many are dead.

The dieoff is caused by a beetle, the redbay ambrosia beetle, first discovered near Savannah in 2002, apparently imported from Asia on wood packaging. The beetle carries a fungus, laurel wilt, which it introduces to the trees and then farms. Actually the fungus, not the beetle, kills the tree.

The beetle is marching through Georgia and beyond, and nothing has been found to stop it. It has spread to South Carolina and Florida, and will not stop there, but work its way through the redbay’s range, the coastal plain of the South.

We can blame the fire ant on Alabama, but this one’s on us.

Right now, go out and find a redbay, and hug it, because, unless we find some way to stop the ambrosia beetle, we are watching a dieoff of the magnitude of the chestnut tree extinction.

And don’t transport firewood. If a redbay dies in your yard, do not give away the wood. Urge counties susceptible to laurel wilt to enact restrictions on the movement of firewood. Keep the beetle and its fungus confined.

I can’t imagine the South without redbays.



Naturalist Janisse Ray is watching kestrels and hawks return to their wintering grounds. She writes from Appling County.

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