The Bugs of The North
August 22, 2014 10:34 am Leave your thoughts
It is impossible to think about doing a summer in the North of Canada without mentioning the bugs….Wow. Never in my life have I ever experienced anything like the hordes of swarming, biting, aggressive insect life of this forest!
Around the middle of June, the blackflies began making the appearance known on the blocks, climbing under long sleeves and bandanas, into hard hats, socks, gloves….they are a relentless force! There were times when doing pay plots that I would look down and not even be able to see my pants through the swarms of bugs! They regularly inspired angry haikus written in relief breaks in the trucks…
Murders Against Truck Windows
Oh my God! The bugs!
It is so satisfying
To squash them. Kersplat!
Equal Grounds
The scourge of the North.
Chased; animals and humans,
Together we run.
I cannot even begin to describe the torment they caused, leaving my skin aggravated and burning from bites. I don’t think it is actually humanly possible for me to move over the land as quickly as I did in that week of blackflies, but somehow, I managed it!
Luckily, after that week the dragonfly population exploded, coming out of the shallow ponds in droves, hungry for blackflies! They were totally my heroes! It was almost a spiritual feeling, watching the swarms of elegant bugs hover down the roadways, settle onto your hi-vis vest for rests from the feast….the numbers of them were like anything I have ever seen and is going to leave me with a respect for dragonflies that I never had before this experience.
Another incredible beneficial insect we got lots of interaction with is the feral bee population. Along all of our roadways and in some of the greener blocks are a great variety of wildflowers (“weeds”) that at all times of day are covered in an equally various amount of bees. From bumbles to small types that almost look like flies, they busily work all day collecting pollen and continuing to support this flower population, as well as that of their own populations. I have certainly never seen this number or variety of wild bee at home and it is quite a relief to see, considering the crisis at hand when it comes to bees.
Towards the end of the plant, once we got into the blocks that had previously been burned, we began to face a whole new kind of bug issue, one that is far more devastating-grasshoppers. Beginning in the 2013 season, and now this current season, they began to be an issue on freshly planted blocks, eating the tender young Jack Pines that were being planted. Within hours of being planted, the young trees are hungrily devoured by the juvenile grasshoppers and within one day, you can enter those same planted blocks and find scarcely a tree around…sometimes just piles of needles. This is a very new problem, leaving seasoned veterans of the forest industry wondering how to deal with this grasshopper apocalypse. Entomologists and other representatives from the Ministry of Natural Resources have been out to the attacked areas and taken specimens of the insects to determine if they are, in fact, actually eating the trees as the first step towards finding a response to the problem. This will also assist Tembec in acquiring help from Forest Futures in the regeneration of these problem areas.
It is going to require some very adaptive management on behalf of Tembec to deal with this issue. As it is so new, there is no tried and true method for dealing with these pests. One potential idea includes mechanical site prep (creation of trenches), with the mineral soil being turned over and hopefully burying eggs from this season. It certainly is going to be interesting to see some studies done on this issue in the coming years related to why this is happening (function of climate change?) and how to best deal with it (hopefully without pesticides!).
This season of bugs was an incredible learning experience, giving me new insights to their cycles and purposes in the ecosystem…but next time I work in the Boreal, I am wearing my bug net!