March 4, 1896.] 



Garden and Forest. 



99 



a genus distinguished from the other genera of Bromeliaceae 

 by its small white subunisexual flowers, and represented by 

 about ten species, inhabitants of Mexico and the south- 

 western United States, and Bifrenaria tyrianthina, a Bra- 

 zilian Orchid with rather showy purple flowers. 



The Forest. 

 Forest Protection.* — II. 



PROTECTING the forest against game is a matter which 

 may lay claim to our interest simply as a branch of 

 its natural history. We have not yet reached that re- 

 finement of forest management which alone makes it 

 important. Nevertheless, the capacity of our native game 

 for destruction is worthy of remark. Of all the game ani- 

 mals of this country the beaver has the greatest power for 

 injuring the forest in proportion to its size. The writer was 

 fortunate enough to visit the small colony of beavers on 

 Mr. Rutherford Stuyvesant's place in New Jersey, and was 

 amazed at the number and size of the trees cut down in a 

 year by a single family of beavers. 



Within the deer tribe in America, so far as my informa- 

 tion goes, the moose is by far the most destructn e, as, 

 indeed, might be inferred from its size and power. "From 

 time to time," says a recent writer in Fores/ and Stream, 

 " we came upon places where the young trees, Moose- 

 wood and Maple saplings, had been broken down, gen- 

 erally at a height of seven or eight feet above the ground, 

 and where other trees of the same variety had been 

 stripped of their bark. . . . This was accomplished, not, 

 as writers used to assert, by riding the trees down between 

 the forelegs, but by means of a twist of the powerful neck 

 of the animal. A moose, like other deer, has no upper 

 teeth, and the barking of the trees is accomplished by a 

 long upward sweep of the jaw." 



The food of the moose consists very largely of Maples, 

 at least five species of which, of arborescent size, occur 

 within its usual range. It feeds also on the White Birch, 

 on several species of Viburnum and Willow and on other 

 deciduous trees and shrubs, and occasionally strips the bark 

 from the Balsam Fir. The enormous strength of the great 

 deer is strikingly illustrated in the following extract from a 

 recent issue of Shooting and Fishing ; "Turning his head, 

 he (the moose) caught a White Birch as large as my arm 

 between his antlers, and with as much apparent ease as 

 you would bend a willow twig between two fingers, twisted 

 his neck and broke it squarely over. The tree was certainly 

 three inches through." 



Among birds, grouse devour buds in great numbers, and 

 blue jays are very destructive to seed. The wild turkey 

 also consumes large quantities of certain seeds, often pull- 

 ing up young Chestnut seedlings in their first spring to 

 devour the nut out of which they grow. Woodpeckers, on 

 the other hand, are said to deserve protection. 



The general breadth of view already referred to as charac- 

 terizing this work is pleasantly shown in the introduc- 

 tion to the discussion of injurious insects. The statement 

 preliminary to the description of individual harmful species 

 indicates the position of the insects in the animal kingdom, 

 and gives the divisions of the class itself, with their charac- 

 teristics. A section is devoted to the distribution of insects, 

 and others to their life-history, their numbers and to the 

 useful kinds of forest insects. The latter is especially valu- 

 ble, from one point of view, since the idea so generally 

 prevails that insects of every sort are to be classed together 

 as injurious. 



The following sentences, coupled with the general state- 

 ment that conifers are far more susceptible to attack than 

 broad-leaved trees, may serve to give a succinct view of 

 the relation of insects and the forest. 



The greatest number and the most harmful species of inju- 

 rious forest insects belong to the orders Coleoptera (beetles) 



" * A Manual of Forestry, by Dr. W. Schlich, CLE. Vol. iv., Forest Protection, by 

 W. R. Fisher, B.A. London : Bradbury, Agnew & Co. 



and Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths). Next in importance 

 to these come the members of the orders Hymenoptera (bees 

 and ants) and Orthoptera (locusts and termites). The orders 

 Diptera (flies) and Hemiptera (bugs) only include species 

 which are moderately or slightly injurious, and the Neurop- 

 tera (lace-winged flies, etc.) include no injurious species. 

 In India and other hot countries, the family of termites, or 

 white ants, ... is probably more destructive to vegetable 

 substance, though chiefly when no longer living, than any 

 other insect family. 



Among the Coleoptera, those which are of greatest 

 interest to us are the bark beetles of the genus Tomicus 

 which are extraordinarily destructive to Spruce forests'. 

 The singular dying out of the Adirondack Spruce over large 

 areas at the same moment, which was for a longtime unex- 

 plained, has been found to be due to a bark beetle closely 

 related to the European species here described. That we 

 are not alone in suffering from them appears from the fol- 

 lowing extract : "Some details may be given of the latest 

 plagues of bark beetles in the Bavarian and Bohemian for- 

 ests. In the former about 24,700,000 cubic feet of wood 

 was killed in six forest ranges. The beetles were occasion- 

 ally so numerous as to obscure the sun. Accompanying 

 Tomicus typographus were T. chalcographus, Hylastes 

 palliatus, etc. In the Finisterau range 1,000 woodmen 

 were engaged to fell and bark the trees, and, as local labor 

 was insufficient, Bohemians and Italians were recruited for 

 the work. In the Bohemian forest the damage done was 

 even on a larger scale: between 1872 and 1874, on 9,012 

 hectares (22,530 acres), 3,632,050 cm. (127,964,000 cubic 

 feet) of wood, or about 450 cubic feet per acre, were felled. 

 Thus, altogether, in Bohemia and Bavaria, 152,600,000 cubic 

 feet of wood was killed by these insects." 



Another species, Hylurgus piniperda, while it is re- 

 sponsible for far less damage than the species of Tomicus, 

 has interest in that it attacks Pines instead of Spruce^ 

 and among them our own Pinus Strobus, where it 

 has been planted in Europe. Nothing is said of the Elm 

 beetle, which has been proving so extremely destructive to 

 both native and European species of Elms in the north- 

 eastern United States. This species is not a native. Among 

 the Lepidoptera, all species destructive on a large scale are 

 moths. One of the most dangerous is the Pine moth, Gas- 

 tropacha Pini, the caterpillar of which feeds upon the 

 needles, and of whose depredations Mr. Fisher says : "In 

 1878, in Plietnitz, in West Prussia, forty-five millions of 

 caterpillars were destroyed by means of tar rings, at a cost 

 of 7s. per ten thousand caterpillars. In woods under sixty 

 years old the hibernating caterpillars were collected at a 

 cost of 20s. per ten thousand. The value of the annual 

 increment of wood saved was 8s. per acre, as against 7s., 

 the cost of the tar rings." 



Another moth whose depredations are yet more danger^ 

 ous is the Black Arche or Nun moth, whose attacks are 

 chiefly confined to the Spruce. Some idea of the severity 

 of this pest may be gathered from the fact that in East 

 Prussia, between 1853 a "d 1863, trees containing 467 

 million cubic feet of wood were killed by the Nun moth. 

 The damage done in the neighboring Russian province 

 was still more serious, so that in Russia and Prussia 

 together about six and one-half billion cubic feet of timber 

 was killed. It is but just to add that a part of this damage 

 was to be attributed to bark beetles, but it is probably true 

 that they would have done little harm except for the weak- 

 ened condition which followed the attack of the Nun. 



The account of dangerous insects concludes with an 

 interesting list, which names, under the head of the kind of 

 tree attacked, the insect enemies of every part of it. 

 New York. Gifford Pinchot. 



Notes. 



A correspondent of The Rural New Yorker writes that for 

 giving young trees a strong, healthy growth in the nursery he 

 has found no fertilizer as good as the combination of six hun- 

 dred pounds of pure steamed bone and a hundred pounds of 

 nitrate of soda applied in the spring, while later in the season 



