MAINE MONITOR • April 19, 2025
Forty-five years ago a voracious insect called the spruce budworm was ravaging Maine’s North Woods, killing mountainsides of balsam fir and red spruce. Maine’s landowners rushed to harvest still-healthy trees. Thousands of acres of the North Woods were clear-cut and sprayed with herbicides to knock back brush and hardwood trees that would crowd out commercially valuable species. Dense forests were replaced with stripped tracts of land. Today, foresters and landowners are nervously tracking a renewed spruce budworm presence in the North Woods. The insects have already stripped hundreds of thousands of forest acres in Quebec and Ontario. Questions abound over how the state’s forests will fare in a world beset by climate change. Today, stands of late-stage and old-growth forest are few and scattered valuable trees are being cut by high-grading. Many of Maine’s woodlands hold a predominance of small trees with little commercial value, especially since the decline of the state’s paper and pulp industries. The forests are less resilient to disruptions and disease. The degradation of the timberlands has been exacerbated by widespread ownership changes. The best defense is to cultivate woodlands with a diversity of trees and reduce the concentration of fir and spruce, the budworms’ main target.