"They are All Going to Die"

by Bert Thomas
former SBTH Board President
May 2021

The ash trees started falling about 2013, four years after we bought the property. The dying had already started, of course, as the invasive emerald ash borer was pushing its way through the Leelanau Peninsula pretty strongly. “They’re all going to die,” is what we heard and that’s what has happened on our 10 acres.

Parts of the woods looked like a game of pick-up sticks with ash trunks lying crosswise on each other or leaning against sugar maples, beech and bass trees. Some had snapped off halfway up the trunk. We left those standing for the birds to poke at, roost or nest in, or use as a perch for catching insects, such as the Eastern Wood-Pewee did last year. Most of the leaners were cut to lie flat to hasten decomposition. Some still stand complete, straight and towering in the forest but not living.

Ring counts suggest the forest is over 100 years old, which lines up with the logging across the area in the late 1800s. Nature has replaced with diverse native species what was lost to the loggers. But because we found no oaks, we planted red and white oak saplings. To diversify further we planted white pines, hemlock and white spruce, mountain ash, American chestnut, American hazelnut, white birch and understory plants like various species of viburnum, dogwood, serviceberry and five leatherwood shrubs among others.

All of these were bare-root saplings, and over the past dozen years the survivors are looking great. We have earned our Certified Bird Habitat sign from Saving Birds Thru Habitat and joined Doug Tallamy’s Homegrown National Park website (www.homegrownnationalpark.org). As for the birds? They love the habitat and as a budding (some may dispute the possibility of that) wildlife photographer, I have a wide range of subjects to photograph all summer without leaving our place.

The point is, we can all do this with no more than a small patch of land. But you know this already; I’m preaching to the choir. Birds eat what they’ve grown up with and native plants host the insects and fruit they need. Seeing a flock of kingbirds hanging on the branches of a pagoda dogwood tree in August devouring berries is an amazing sight.

You may not know that our board of directors voted in two new members at our meeting in early April – Karen Edgley and John Putnam. Both are well rooted in the Omena area part of the year and will be strong additions to our team, which has reached the maximum number—eleven—allowed by our bylaws.

In addition to working with Kay to do a complete overhaul of our website (soon coming), we took under wing the excellent website Sleeping Bear Birding Trail (www.sleepingbearbirdingtrail.org) in January to link us more securely to the wider birding community, and are in the early stage of a major initiative to ensure the organization for the future. For that we’ll definitely need your help and when the time comes, we’ll tell you all about it.