Jeremy Eubanks, forester trainee, takes notes on tree locations while Eric Taylor, forester, injects pesticide around the roots of a hemlock. Foresters with the Cherokee National Forest injected a pesticide around the base of hemlocks at the Lost Creek Campground, hoping to stop the destruction of the trees by hemlock wooly adelgids.
Staff Photo by Jake Daniels/Chattanooga Times Free PressCLEVELAND, Tenn.-Foresters with the Cherokee National Forest and its neighbor to the South, Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest, are fighting to save the stately evergreen giants of the woods: eastern and Carolina hemlocks.
The trees, some hundreds of years old, are under attack by a microscopic bug that hitchhiked into the United States about 90 years ago from Asia – the hemlock woolly adelgid.
The sapsucking bugs drain the life from hemlocks in a matter of five to 10 years, according to experts.
“We aren’t able to treat every tree, obviously,” said forester Eric Taylor, who works in the Cherokee National Forest. “So we’ve prioritized some groups of trees scattered all over the forest to hopefully allow those groups to survive in the worst-case scenario. And we have lost a lot in certain places.”
Cherokee and Chattahoochee forestry officials say they have spent about $100,000 on each forest this year, along with a lot of man-hours to treat the handful of hemlocks that have been prioritized by their location or their level of infestation.