THE BRONZE BIRCH BORER 



Agrilus anxius Gory 

 Order Coleoptera ; family BuprestidjE 

 The birch trees with their graceful habits, their slender, often pendulous 

 branches, and their picturesque trunks are conspicuous features of any land- 

 scape. The European white birch in its various weeping and cut-leaved forms 

 has been extensively planted in American city parks and private lawns. Its 

 artistic beauty, with its silvery stemmed branches and fluttering leaves 

 "floating at the discretion of the winds " makes the white birch a constant 

 source of delight both in summer and winter. As compared with the elm or 

 maple, the white birch is considered a short-lived tree, but they frequently 

 survive to grace a landscape for thirty years or more. 



It is with much regret, therefore, that this Experiment Station finds it 



necessary through this bulletin to 

 announce to lovers of these beauti- ' 

 ful white birches that a deadly 

 insect enemy has recently appeared 

 which is fast destroying these trees 

 in city parks and on home grounds. 

 Hundreds of the finest specimens 

 of these graceful trees in Buffalo, 

 (see frontispiece) Ithaca and other 

 cities and towns of New York have 

 succumbed to this enemy within the 

 past eight years. About half of the 

 score of white birches on the Cor- 

 nell University Campus (Fig. 34), 

 some of them over thirty years old, 

 liiive been killed by the insect with- 

 in three years; and several of the 

 remaining trees are infested and 

 will not survive more than a year 

 or two. These facts demonstrate 

 the seriousness of the situation, and 

 demand that city authorities and 

 private owners of these valuable 

 trees acquaint themselves with the 

 FIG 30--., Characteristic rusty brown spotsln details of the work and life-habits 

 bark over the borer in autumn, natural size ; b, ^j this insect SO that remedial meas- 

 birch branch showing the peculiar rtdged effect over be promptly and judici- 



ously applied. 



