Hi all

Just a small crossover article from today's Globe and Mail. Toronto,s
national newspaper.

Roger Craik
Maple Ridge BC


Still no solution to sapsucker problem

DES KENNEDY

Saturday, July 10, 1999


IN B.C. -- Our grounds have been vandalized in recent weeks by a pair of
red-breasted sapsuckers. These are brightly plumed members of the woodpecker
family, a subspecies of the sapsuckers found in breeding season all across
the country. They make their living by drilling parallel rows of small holes
into the bark around the trunk of a living tree, later returning to drink
sap pouring from the holes and to eat any insects stuck to the sap.

My bird book tells me they are "quiet, retiring and easily overlooked."
That's scarcely the case at our place; more like destructive, brazen and a
damned nuisance.

They drill their holes in apple and crabapple trees, in cherries and plums,
magnolias and even large lilac bushes. Girdling the trunk, the holes
certainly mar the appearance of a tree and can severely weaken it and expose
it to fungal or other pest invasions. Their favourite food sources at our
place are birch and mountain ash trees, whose thin bark they chip away in
lozenge-shaped patches, leaving a scanty latticework of bark between the
holes.

In recent years they have killed two mountain ash outright by entirely
perforating most of the trunk's bark and have seriously crippled two others.
Our little copse of European white birches has stubbornly clung to life
despite repeated seasonal assaults by sapsuckers.

Tapping away at a trunk, they'll allow us to walk right up to them, almost
close enough to touch them. When disturbed, they utter a single, truncated
cry like the wheeze of an asthmatic seagull and fly off with the pulsing
flight pattern typical of woodpeckers.

I've tried attaching fine-mesh wire around the trunks of susceptible trees
as a deterrent; I've repeatedly smeared the drill holes with tree wound
paste. But to no avail. The birds either drill fresh holes on unprotected
parts of the trunk or switch to new trees. I'm told there is a toxic
substance that can be painted onto the trunk as a repellent. We haven't yet
fallen to this last resort -- yet.

Which brings us to the notion of a sacrifice plant. This is a plant that one
retains for the purpose of attracting pests to it in order that they'll
leave more desirable plants alone. The most notable success we've enjoyed
has been Russian red kale used as a sacrifice plant for aphids. We leave a
number of these big biennial brassicas in the vegetable garden to flower and
set seed in their second year. By high summer the flowering stalks of one or
two kales are coated with swarming aphids and, we hope, their natural
predators -- lady beetle and caddis fly larvae. Other plants, meanwhile,
thrive nearby entirely free of aphids.

So it occurred to us to adopt a similar strategy with the sapsuckers. More
mountain ash seemed the order of the day. Speaking frankly, in the sometimes
brutal world of gardening realpolitik, I'd rather sacrifice a mountain ash
or two if by doing so we can save the magnolias, cherries and apples.
Admittedly, this element of sacrifice plant theory smacks of an
end-justifies-the-means approach whose ethical implications it's probably
wiser not to explore.

But here's the rub: Does one, by planting species particularly attractive to
certain pests, sometimes defeat one's purposes by attracting additional
pests? Will planting several more mountain ash, as we now propose to do,
even knowing them to be doomed, keep the sapsuckers happy and allow our
other trees to grow in peace? Or will an expansion of their favourite food
source simply encourage more sapsuckers to take up residence, their
expanding populations eventually dooming other trees besides the mountain
ashes?

If, on the other hand, one were to eliminate mountain ash and birch trees
from the place -- something the sapsuckers are well on their way to
accomplishing already -- would the wretched birds go elsewhere to find their
favourite foods, or would they continue nesting close by and switch to
attacking other prized trees? Experimentation in these areas is far more
easily conducted with annuals and biennials than it is with trees, where a
poor choice today could spell disaster eight or 10 years from now. Which is
why such matters are perhaps best left out of the gardening column and in
the bird column where they rightfully belong.

Des Kennedy's latest book is An Ecology of Enchantment: A Year in a Country
Garden(HarperCollins).

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