Bigleaf maple trees are in danger from both poaching and a mysterious die-off.
As the autumn skies of the Northwest fill up with golden leaves the size of dinner plates, scientists and law enforcement officials are working to safeguard the region’s iconic bigleaf maples — which are facing a dual-pronged threat from poachers and a mysterious dieback.
“It’s kind of a double whammy,” said Shiloh Halsey, the conservation science director at the Cascade Forest Conservancy.
For about two decades, bigleaf maples up and down the West Coast have been dying: producing small, scorched leaves before becoming completely bare.
While conservationists have struggled to solve Mother Nature’s threat to the trees, they’re faced with a more obvious, if equally vexing, menace: poaching. Since the turn of the century, bigleaf maples have been in demand, as certain trees have beautiful patterns in the wood grain, making them a popular choice for instruments, especially guitars.
“I hate to even think about how many we don’t get,” said Jim Oesterle, Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington. Oesterle estimated his office prosecutes one or two cases of bigleaf maple poaching a year. “There’s really no means of detection. There are very few rangers (or) law enforcement monitoring this.”
With Washington’s vast swaths of public land, agencies don’t have the resources to patrol every area. Unless law enforcement is tipped off in time to catch poachers in the act, they end up finding the evidence of poaching after the fact — trees scarred by axes where poachers have tried to get a glimpse of the wood beneath the bark, others felled by chainsaws, with the majority of the tree left to rot.
“They’ll see trees that are scarred when (poachers) are looking for that certain wood configuration,” Oesterle said. “If they don’t see it, they’ll move on to the next tree. That will end up probably killing a lot of those trees, the way they disfigure it.”
Oesterle said most of the poaching is a “crime of opportunity,” carried out by desperate people, often drug addicts, looking to make a quick buck. A two-foot block of the tree’s wood, according to a High Country News story last year, can fetch about $500.
In 2015, authorities successfully prosecuted a Winlock sawmill operator who had been purchasing bigleaf maples poached from the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, using DNA evidence to match the lumber with stumps that had been cut in the forest. The case was seen as a breakthrough — by targeting sawmills as well as poachers, it was hoped that the precedent could help shrink demand for the wood.
Since that case, said Gifford Pinchot spokeswoman Sue Ripp, Forest Service officials have yet to find any large-scale areas of cut trees. However, they’ve seen “maple scraping,” the scars where poachers have removed the bark to determine if the trees have value.
Mark Camisa, a Forest Service law enforcement officer, said the agency has yet to have any major breakthroughs since the 2015 case. It’s unclear whether that’s due to a lack of detection or a decrease in poaching.
“There definitely is more signs that stuff’s going on, there’s activity, but there’s nothing that’s really brewing to talk about,” he said.
In January, an Olympic Peninsula resident was sentenced to prison for poaching bigleaf maples near Olympic National Park. He was caught only after a neighbor heard chainsaw noises in the woods over multiple nights, finally alerting law enforcement officials who responded to catch him in the act when he returned.
While the poaching is troubling, the dieback represents an even more widespread — and confusing — threat to bigleaf maples. Dan Omdal, a forest pathologist with the Washington Department of Natural Resources, has been getting calls about dying maples for about 20 years. For a while, he attributed the dieback to a kind of root rot, but over time the dying trees have proven untraceable to a single symptom.
“It remains a mystery,” he said. “I don’t believe there will be a silver bullet. There have yet to be any a-ha moments.”
Omdal and his fellow researchers have been using the process of elimination, looking for things like vascular wilt, root pathogens, and invasive beetles. So far, no single cause has served to explain why so many of the trees are dying. When the dieback hits the trees, they no longer produce their signature giant leaves, instead showing small, scorched-looking leaves before going bare completely.
Because the rate of the dieback has remained steady for years, Omdal said it’s possible the problem is related to climate change. Researchers are also looking at whether it’s connected to weather events or disturbances from civilization, as trees near buildings and roads seem to be the most hard-hit.
“No one thing in particular seems to be able to adequately explain the diversity of dieback,” he said. “It seems to be a slow, steady slog for many of these trees. … It’s a real puzzle. We can’t put our finger on one issue, that if we would eliminate that problem then the maples would respond.”
Omdal said bigleaf maples are important for forest health, providing shade, cooling streams, feeding wildlife with seeds and providing habitat for tree-dwelling animals. Thankfully, the dieback is not yet a threat to wipe out the species.
“There’s new growth and young maples growing up,” he said. “It’s not a species that’s in decline, but there are individuals that are clearly sick.”
He said the issue does not get as much attention as other trees because bigleaf maples don’t make up a significant portion of the commercial timber industry.
“One of the reasons why there’s not a greater interest is because some people don’t consider the risk to be that great,” he said, paraphrasing the argument: “‘If we lost bigleaf maple, how much would we actually lose?’”
Oesterle said the justice system has faced similar challenges, as poaching crimes as seen as petty when judged by the dollar amount of the offense.
“We’ve been successful in arguing that the value ... is higher than just what the mill can get for the wood,” he said. “These are valuable resources beyond just what the wood can bring. What’s motivating is these are resources that cannot be replaced in several lifetimes. ... You can’t replace these trees.”
